Islamic Financial Services
Qatar has been a prominent player in the region’s Islamic banking sector since the early 1980s, and Islamic banking accounted for roughly 26% of the country’s total banking assets as of March 2015, with growth in the first nine months of 2014 outstripping that of Qatar’s largest banks. Meanwhile, the country was the region’s third-largest issuer of sukuk in both 2013 and 2014, while 6.2% of global sukuk issuance in the first half of 2014 used the Qatari riyal, behind only the Malaysian ringgit, US dollar and Saudi riyal. Elsewhere, the new Islamic stock index, the Al Rayan Islamic Index, offers traders the opportunity to steer capital into a subset of sharia-screened companies with strong fundamentals.
This chapter contains an interview with Bassel Gamal, Group CEO, Qatar Islamic Bank.
