Factors that affect the participation bank preference of businesses: Bolu case

The initial examples of appliacations of participation banking, known as "Interest-free Banking" and developing rapidly in today's finance sector, date back to B.C 2000s. In the historical process, it has passed various levels and reached today's position. The first examples of participation banking in the world as means of modern were seen in Egypt in 1960s. In Turkey, it first started to function as "Private Finance Foundation" with Decree as Law in the year of 1983. With the change in 5411 numbered Banking Law, as being "Participation Bank, they started to have same legal rights with other trade banks in 2005. Participation Banking is increasing its portion in the world each passing day. As the initial ones are Citibank and HSBC among the big banks in the world, it is seen that several trade banks have openned units in themselves to have procedures of interest-free bankig. It has started to have a lot of studies on the reasons of preferences of participation banking, whose popularity in the world continues to increase, in individual's perspective. However, the researches on defining the preference resons of businesses are in limited numbers. In this study, it is aimed to define the preference reasons of participation banking of bussinesses in Turkey. In this direction, to determine the factors influencing the working reasons of businesses in Bolu with participation banks, the questionnaire was applied to 225 business authority (owners, partners or finance managers) and the data was analized via SPSS 22. In the study, describing analysis for making statistical results and sample information summarized as numerical demonstration, factor analysis for measuring the validity and trustworthy of developped scale, t-test for measuring the differences of measured factors, Pearson corelation analysis for measuring the degree of relations between dependant and independant factors are applied. Variance analysis were made to test the constructed hypothesis and determine whether the factors influencing the preferences of participation banking have differences according to demographic (independant) factors or not. As a result of obtained variance analysis, in case of differences, tukey test was applied to determine which factor was the reason of the difference. According to obtained data, it is significant that the most influencing factors of business authorities' preference os participation banking are "Interest-free principle, Islamic sensitivity and close relations with branch staff. Being less busy of participation bank branches is also seen effecient in an important degree. Having no concession on religious and humanist belifs, not changing the branch staff with rotation or appointment very often and being connected with the principle of interest-free severely are presented as an offer to save current customers. In gaining new customers, especially to compete with deposit banks, developing strong instruments, increasing the short term financial support and giving importance to marketing activities are presented as an offer.