MACFIS Islamic and Conventional Finance Forum 2012
I attended a forum last night, this time it was of a different subject compared to last week. This forum was about Islamic Finance. It was held in conjunction with the 11th Annual Islamic Finance summit held in London this week. It was held in Malaysian Student department by MACFIS together with LSE Malaysian Society. I know, it's an LSE event, but given how big of a fan I was on the topic, I decided to give it a go. I rushed there as soon as my Arabic class finished at 3 pm.
The speakers were Mr Badlishah, the CEO of Islamic Finance from CIMB Holdings, a very well known speaker on this particular subject, Mr Faizal Karbani, the CEO and founder of Simply Sharia, a consultancy firm which offers advice on sharia compliant for assets and investments, and the third speaker was Mr Justin Kew, a client adviser from JP Morgan.
Basically the forum was all about Islamic finance. For some strange reason the organizer invited Mr Justin to be the representative of conventional banking, something of which I found as being peculiarly unnecessary. I get it that they might have an idea of the forum becoming a stage for a simple showdown between conventional and Islamic finance, unfortunately I do not think it is appropriate, given the event was brief. Nevertheless, I really learnt a lot from the forum.
The forum really managed to spur interest of the crowd on the topic. Mr Badlishah particularly, showed that he is one of the experts in the field. What I really wanted to know more was actually about the sukuk market. Why I like to know about it so much? Well, given the present situation where the Western world, namely the States and UK lost their superiority to the East, they are known to have switched their focus on the financial market. This was also pointed out by Tun M recently, here. The world as we know it no longer uses Bretton Woods system in order to print money, which is the system whereby cash is backed by gold. As stated in history, this old system collapsed in 1971 when President Nixon severed such link. Hence, what better way to penetrate this new game of the Western world by introducing our own player, the sukuk.
Sukuk for all I know is Islamic bonds which has its own characteristics such as being backed by real transactions, plus the contracts must be made clear without having any elements of uncertainty in terms of the trading process and many more. In the recent decades, statistics have shown that the sukuk market is experiencing quite a significant growth. I am very confident that internationally, the sukuk market will have a good prospect in the near future.
Islamic finance is still new, one would say. Only during the last 20 years or so such system is being made famous. Not that it is too late, but being a new product it is susceptible to having faced with bumps along the way. One of the biggest challenge Islamic finance is facing to date is the public understanding of the system itself. It is not that the system is not appealing to investors, but rather it is not well being understood by them. Thus, it is hoped that financial sectors would tackle this issue by providing interested investors sufficient information on how the system runs. Investors are profit motivated, hence once it is known to them that Islamic finance is more than capable to help them achieve it, they will surely be more than welcome to adopt the system.
Enough said, I am not yet ready to be a financial adviser yet, hence I apologize for not being able to write all of this stuff in a better way. I really tried, I promise. Overall the whole forum was very educational. If I were to give my comment on it, I would say I wish that the forum had more time because I honestly want to know more about Islamic finance, not just because I am a Muslim. It is because I want to. I believe that the more you understand things that is going on around you, not only that you'll make more sense of how the world works, but you will then have ideas on how to make things better.
I leave the rest to you.......
The speakers were Mr Badlishah, the CEO of Islamic Finance from CIMB Holdings, a very well known speaker on this particular subject, Mr Faizal Karbani, the CEO and founder of Simply Sharia, a consultancy firm which offers advice on sharia compliant for assets and investments, and the third speaker was Mr Justin Kew, a client adviser from JP Morgan.
Basically the forum was all about Islamic finance. For some strange reason the organizer invited Mr Justin to be the representative of conventional banking, something of which I found as being peculiarly unnecessary. I get it that they might have an idea of the forum becoming a stage for a simple showdown between conventional and Islamic finance, unfortunately I do not think it is appropriate, given the event was brief. Nevertheless, I really learnt a lot from the forum.
The forum really managed to spur interest of the crowd on the topic. Mr Badlishah particularly, showed that he is one of the experts in the field. What I really wanted to know more was actually about the sukuk market. Why I like to know about it so much? Well, given the present situation where the Western world, namely the States and UK lost their superiority to the East, they are known to have switched their focus on the financial market. This was also pointed out by Tun M recently, here. The world as we know it no longer uses Bretton Woods system in order to print money, which is the system whereby cash is backed by gold. As stated in history, this old system collapsed in 1971 when President Nixon severed such link. Hence, what better way to penetrate this new game of the Western world by introducing our own player, the sukuk.
Sukuk for all I know is Islamic bonds which has its own characteristics such as being backed by real transactions, plus the contracts must be made clear without having any elements of uncertainty in terms of the trading process and many more. In the recent decades, statistics have shown that the sukuk market is experiencing quite a significant growth. I am very confident that internationally, the sukuk market will have a good prospect in the near future.
Islamic finance is still new, one would say. Only during the last 20 years or so such system is being made famous. Not that it is too late, but being a new product it is susceptible to having faced with bumps along the way. One of the biggest challenge Islamic finance is facing to date is the public understanding of the system itself. It is not that the system is not appealing to investors, but rather it is not well being understood by them. Thus, it is hoped that financial sectors would tackle this issue by providing interested investors sufficient information on how the system runs. Investors are profit motivated, hence once it is known to them that Islamic finance is more than capable to help them achieve it, they will surely be more than welcome to adopt the system.
Enough said, I am not yet ready to be a financial adviser yet, hence I apologize for not being able to write all of this stuff in a better way. I really tried, I promise. Overall the whole forum was very educational. If I were to give my comment on it, I would say I wish that the forum had more time because I honestly want to know more about Islamic finance, not just because I am a Muslim. It is because I want to. I believe that the more you understand things that is going on around you, not only that you'll make more sense of how the world works, but you will then have ideas on how to make things better.
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| did I mentioned I was the moderator? Yeah, that happened too. |
I leave the rest to you.......
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