Can Social Performance Improve Financial Performance and Increase Customers’ Trust?

Abstract

Social concern is strongly emphasized in Islam. There are the concepts of khalifah fil ard, hablum min nass, tawazun in Islam which demonstrate the Islamic approach to concern for social issues. The purpose of this study is to obtain evidence pertaining to whether social concern in Islamic banks has an impact on improving their performance and the trust of customers. The research sample is 11 Islamic commercial banks in Indonesia. The observation period was from 2009 to 2017. The results of this study show that social activities carried out by banks in the form of qardh financing, and the distribution of qardh al-hassan and zakah funds, were able to increase customer trust in the banks. This increase in trust is evidenced by the positive influence of channeling social funds on increasing debt and temporary syirkah funds. However, the distribution of social funds does not have a positive impact on the amount of funding channeled by banks. As a result, the bank's income from the disbursement of finance cannot increase, and the impact of the bank's profitability does not increase. So, it has been proven empirically that the distribution of social funds does not have a positive impact on the amount of financing and profitability as measured by ROA and ROE.