Thursday 22 December 2011

Benchmark a major step for Islamic finance - The National

Last month, the world's first Islamic interbank benchmark rate (IIBR) was launched. It was the result of a collaborative approach taken by many Islamic financial institutions, industry associations and Sharia scholars over the course of 24 months to address a decades-old industry challenge: how to decouple Islamic finance from a conventional western pricing benchmark (Libor) when an "Islamic" alternative was not available. The objective was to support and preserve Islamic finance authenticity.
The IIBR is an interbank benchmark that offers a reliable and realistic standard to better measure the cost of funding for Islamic financial institutions. As contributed pricing for Sharia-compliant funding, it represents the DNA of an Islamic banking industry that is today focused on commercial banking over investment banking.
IIBR brought together more than 20 Islamic finance institutions to create a proprietary Islamic pricing benchmark. It is a major indication to the world that Islamic finance has come of age and can be seen as a sustainable and rapidly developing feature of global financial markets. The benchmark is designed to be used to price a number of Islamic instruments including common overnight to short-term treasury investment and financing instruments such as murabaha, wakala and mudaraba, retail financing instruments such as property and car finance, and sukuk and other Sharia-compliant fixed-income instruments. It can also be used for the pricing and benchmarking of corporate finance and investment assets.

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