The State of the Islamic Banking Industry

Using statistics compiled for his publication of The Banker magazine’s Top 500 Islamic Financial Institutions, this lecture is an analytical review of the trends, growth, performance, volume, profitability, and major issues of Islamic finance as an industry. An analysis of 1,105 institutions offering Shariah financial services is presented as a topology to understand the evolving regulatory structures, banking capacity and financial depth of the industry as it continues toward its next evolutionary phase as a financial bridge across nation states. Placing the industry’s transformation into a global context, this analysis examines the three dimensions of industry growth (product proliferation, customer acquisition and market expansion) into a connecting relationship between rapidly changing global factors such as politics, socioeconomic trends, attitudinal changes in Muslim and non-Muslim populations, and the influence of the economic crisis on the industry.