By Rushdi Siddiqui

Daud Vicary Abdullah is an authority on Islamic banking and has contributed to a number of books on the subject.

He has been in the finance and consulting industry for more than 38 years, with significant experience in Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Meet Daud Vicary Abdullah, the president and CEO of International Centre of Education in Islamic Finance (Inceif), the global university of Islamic finance.
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By Rushdi Siddiqui, Global Head of Islamic Finance, Thomson Reuters

‘Don’t cheat the world of your contribution. Give it what you’ve got.’ - Steven Pressfield

On November 22, 2011, the world’s first Islamic interbank benchmark rate (IIBR) was launched. It is the result of a collaborative approach taken by many Islamic financial institution, industry associations, and Shariah scholars, over the course of 24 months, to a decades-old industry challenge: how to decouple Islamic finance from a conventional Western pricing benchmark (LIBOR) and the law of necessity when an ‘Islamic’ alternative was not available. The objective was to support and preserve Islamic finance authenticity.
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One of the most over-used words in Islamic finance is not standardization, scholars, regulations, etc., but ‘consolidation’. Islamic banks, Islamic leasing companies, Takaful companies need to consolidate to reach size and achieve scale.

As larger capitalized entities, they can better compete with not just the Islamic windows and subsidiaries of conventional banks and insurance companies (like HSBC or Prudential) but eventually the larger conventional financial institutions for mandates on project finance, M&A, buyouts, and so on.

Then again, what about consolidation amongst the Islamic industry bodies, the likes of AAOIFI (Accounting and Auditing Organization of Islamic Financial Institutions), IIRA (International Islamic Rating Agency), IIFM (International Islamic Financial Market), and CIBAFI (General Council for Islamic Banks & Financial Institutions)?
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