Tonight, shortly after 10:30pm Central European Summer Time (CEST), MSCI will announce the results of its 2019 annual market classification review. Kuwait is the only country on the review list for a potential upgrade to EM. We expect MSCI to upgrade Kuwait to EM, and the current proposal is for the upgrade to be effective as of May 2020 (it is possible that MSCI may decide to split the event over two tranches, potentially May/August 2020, although this is not our base case as Kuwait’s trade is much smaller than Saudi Arabia and China-A, which were split over multiple tranches). We expect Kuwait to account for 0.62% of MSCI EM, leading to cUSD2.8bn of inflows. NBK could see an additional cUSD717mn of inflows (adding 17bps to Kuwait’s weight), if the liquidity adjustment factor is removed, and we see this as likely by November 2020.