Summer holidays are already a distant memory!
As a UK headquartered business with offices in a growing number of international centres for Islamic Finance, it is always our pleasure to attend the Mansion House each year as a Partner for Islamic Finance News (IFN) UK Islamic Finance Summit. As a ‘home’ event the Summit has strong content focus on the growth and development of our domestic market whilst still enabling us to catch up with current issues and innovations in other established and emerging centres for Islamic finance.
This year, we welcomed the opportunity to catch up with so many established clients, partners and friends, alongside an elevated number of newer faces to the market including, encouragingly, a very strong representation by asset managers, particularly those operating from the UK.
This year’s Summit served us sharp reminder that, post- UK election and summer recess, it is imperative that we pick up momentum quickly and continue our domestic themes of Islamic financial industry development and enablement.
Although it is exciting, and indeed necessary, to innovate and diversify asset classes, deepen the Islamic capital market and support Islamic banks and FI to grow market share, this also means that we must make a renewed effort to complete all that we have long since started within our home market, and, most importantly, we must close out a number of projects in process that have had ‘pending’ status for far too long.
Amongst them we have an obligation to cut through the remaining red tape and implement the Sharia compliant student finance solution that government has laboured over for many years, find successful resolutions regarding the tax revisions needed to (re)level the playing field in certain areas of Islamic financial services and, renew and refresh efforts to support a plethora of exciting new businesses obtain access to capital.
At a personal level I’m also excited by the momentum building here now around a different nexus, as we continue to explore Sharia compliant product integrations with sustainable and impactful approaches for better outcomes. As financial sector firms we might choose or, increasingly, be compelled to act by new law and regulation but, make no mistake, our customers are demanding it!
