ICD: what’s next for the Islamic finance market?

Having shown its resilience by withstanding external financial shocks, and with cities across the world showing increased interest, it appears that Islamic finance is here to stay

The history of Islamic finance goes back more than 1,400 years, when the general population was mostly active in goods trading. However, modern Islamic finance has seen a rapid resurgence, particularly since the mid-1970s, and today one can claim that Islamic finance is present on a global basis across all segments of the financial markets. In fact, the industry has seen tremendous growth in the past 20 years, with total assets rising from $150bn in the 1990s to exceeding the $2tn mark in 2014.
More recently, global financial centres, such as London, Singapore, Hong Kong and Luxembourg have begun to show increasing interest in serving as financial hubs for Islamic finance. This has been spurred by successes in the sukuk (bond) market, which had a particularly commendable performance last year, reaching $104bn from 630 issues at the end of October 2014. Given the impact that the industry is having, World Finance sat down with the CEO of the Islamic Corporation for the Development of the Private Sector (ICD), Khaled Al-Aboodi, to discuss how Islamic finance aims to continue its success.
What do you think the potential of the Islamic finance market is?
We can see that Islamic finance is getting more and more recognition worldwide, especially due to its social and ethical aspects and also importantly for its impact on the real economy. As the Islamic finance industry expands its outreach and becomes more mainstream across the Muslim world we will certainly see more product innovation and a reduction in transaction costs, which should result in greater depth in the various segments of the markets. With more governments recognising the added value of Islamic finance as a comprehensive financial system, which can run parallel to their conventional system, more policy attention is being paid to introducing an Islamic finance legal and regulatory framework, which should lead to better corporate governance and risk management across the industry.

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