THE Indonesia Stock Exchange greeted its latest listing on May 9th: that of BRIsyariah, the Islamic arm of state-controlled Bank Rakyat Indonesia, the country’s biggest bank by assets. The initial public offering (IPO) of 27% of BRIsyariah’s equity raised around 1.3trn rupiah ($92m). Islam outlaws the payment of interest, the basis of conventional banking. Yet […]
May (Reuters) – The Accounting and Auditing Organisation for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI) has issued its first standard covering wakala, or investment agency contracts, in a bid to harmonise practices for the widely used structure. The guidance issued late on Wednesday from Bahrain-based AAOIFI, one of the main standard-setting bodies in Islamic finance, aims to […]
Today, we are witnessing an emergent Islamic finance industry with global assets of over $2 trillion and growing at around 10 per cent per annum, taking hold in leading international markets. There is also a thriving Islamic capital market with issuances of Shariah-compliant asset-based securities (Sukuk) reaching to $98 billion in 2017. With these recent […]
As the global economy experiences its first green shoots, one cannot forget the economic trauma precipitated by the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, one of the worst in living memory. Following the crisis, many economists revisited the question of whether the seeds of the recurrent crises lie in systemic flaws in the financial system. A […]
(Reuters) – Afghanistan’s central bank has granted a license to the Islamic Bank of Afghanistan (IBA), the first lender in the country to apply the interest-free principles of Islamic finance in all its operations, a senior bank official told Reuters. The IBA was previously known as Bakhtar Bank and operated under a conventional banking license […]
The Islamic banking and finance industry has been growing at a rapid rate over the last decade – around twice the pace of its conventional counterpart – with the number and geographic reach of these institutions increasing exponentially. The industry’s assets stood at $2trn in 2015 and are expected to top $3.5trn by 2021 according […]
The success and continuous growth of any industry depends on how fast it can develop the ecosystem required to make it more inclusive and accessible The Islamic finance ecosystem includes appropriate legal and regulatory frameworks that recognise an intrinsic approach, allowing it to operate efficiently in a diversified financial system. In addition, it includes adequate […]
Morocco is finally firming up plans to issue its first sukuk. More than a year after granting licenses to five local banks to set up Islamic finance affiliates in partnerships with majors such as Qatar International Islamic Bank and Dallah al-Baraka, the North African nation says it is now closing in on plans to […]
DUBAI/SYDNEY (Reuters) – In Dubai’s decades-old Gold Souk, customers from around the world haggle over bangles and necklaces. Elsewhere in the emirate, the region’s top center for gold trade, bullion is playing a new role in financial engineering A local start-up company founded last year, OneGram, is issuing a gold-backed cryptocurrency — part of efforts […]
Set to take off in the UK, Islamic finance could fund major infrastructure projects and even be boosted by Brexit One of the fastest expanding financial services sectors globally is Islamic finance, which has consistently shown growth rates of around 10 to 12 per cent annually over the last two decades and has assets of around […]
While Islamic finance centres in Southeast Asia and the Middle East keep dominating core developments in the sector, and news are currently almost exclusively focused on upcoming Shariah-compliant financial markets in Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and Europe, activities elsewhere are quite out of the limelight, but unjustifiably so. An upcoming Islamic finance […]
Uncertainty around Islamic finance needs to be addressed, but so does the lack of standardisation about what is right and wrong in the west
