Emirates Bank Group (EBG) through its subsidiary Emirates Islamic Bank (EIB) and Amlak Finance, the largest publicly listed Islamic finance company and pioneer in home finance in the UAE yesterday announced the signing of an AED 800 million flexible 360 day Wakala facility.

This is the first step of a much more comprehensive relationship between the two leading Islamic finance institutes in the UAE which will deliver innovative Islamic Finance products to the regional market.

There are still some barriers to the expansion of the Islamic finance industry, a new survey from the Big 4 firm KPMG has found.

A
lack of qualified Islamic bankers, weaknesses in transparency and
financial reporting and the ongoing matter of regulatory capital are
all obstacles to the growth of the sector, the KPMG report, titled
Growth and Diversification in Islamic Finance, stated.

What hit Mr Jaspal Singh Bindra, Regional CEO, South East and South Asia of Standard Chartered Bank, when he was recently in Brunei for a day was the diversity in terms of gender compared to the rest of SCB institutions..

In an attempt to iron out minor clogs in its system and achieve complete harmony with the conventional banking system, the global Islamic banking and financial market was going through standardisation upheavals.But the churning process was inevitable to ensure a standardised single-structure for the sector to grow by leaps and bounds. The International Financial Market 2007 conference that got under way here yesterday reflected that global Islamic banking dilemma and its efforts to bail itself out of the uniform model muddle.