Manama: The World Islamic Banking Conference (WIBC) will be developing a comprehensive performance assessment framework to help Islamic financial institutions assess their ranking and performance vis-à-vis their competitors.
The event is hosted by Bahrain annually and this year’s edition will be held from December 1 to 3 at the Gulf Hotel.
Specifically, the WIBC Performance Indicator will form the basis of the annually anticipated WIBC Performance Awards that will be announced at the WIBC gala dinner on December 2.
The WIBC Leaderboard will provide rankings of the top Islamic banks and financial institutions based on a variety of robust financial and governance metrics such as asset growth, return on equity, return on assets, disclosures, corporate social responsibility and Sharia
governance.
The leaderboard will provide industry participants a visually engaging view of Islamic banks to compare themselves with their peers at the global, regional and national levels across several dimensions.
In addition to the individual metrics, banks will also be ranked on the basis of an aggregate score, which forms the apex of the WIBC Leaderboard.
This aggregate index holistically ranks entities on the basis of the aforementioned financial and governance measures.
It will, therefore, act as a benchmark for Islamic banks to gauge their performance against the top performing banks in the industry. The aggregate scores will be the basis of the WIBC Performance Awards to be awarded to the top global and regional banks at WIBC 2015.
In addition to the regional and global awards, the top most performing banks in each country with a developed Islamic banking sector will also be awarded.
The data employed in creating the assessment framework has been sourced from the Islamic Development Bank Group (ICD) Thomson Reuters Islamic Finance Development Indicator (IFDI).
The convener of WIBC for the last 22 years is ME Global Advisors whose chief executive Dr Sayd Farook said the performance metric was the first such objective and scientifically verifiable basis for the Islamic banks to rank their respective banks’ performances with each other and would go a long way in developing a competitive yet healthy Islamic banking sector globally.
“I would like to laud the efforts of Thomson Reuters and ICD for collating reliable and accurate data which have helped ME Global advisors in creating such an imperative performance framework,” he added.
According to ICD chief executive Khalid Al Aboodi, the changing regulatory and technological landscape of the banking industry in general pose an immense challenge for both Islamic as well as conventional banks and the metric would help banks keep track of their performance, pushing them to converge with leading banks.
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