CAIRO: The number of institutions offering sharia-compliant financial instruments in Egypt are on the rise, and the sector now represents more than $270 billion globally. ISI Egypt has highlighted the rise of such sharia-compliant financial information products in a gathering of representatives from ISI global, local banks and the media. Both state-owned and private banks offering sharia-compliant products to customers, according to a report on the Status of sharia-Compliant Finance in Egypt released Sunday by ISI. Egypt was recently ranked among three countries that delievered the highest returns for investors in companies compliant with shariah during the first quarter of 2008. According to Standard & Poor's ratings service, shariah-compliant equity markets in Morocco, Egypt and Nigeria have respectively returned 34.45 percent, 18.93 percent and 13.42 percent on a total return basis. "With the growth of the sharia-compliant financial sector, both within and beyond the Islamic world, quantitative and analytical data on these types of products is essential to providing high quality and up-to-date information to the financial services industry, said Rafy Kourouian, country manager of ISI Egypt. "The Islamic Finance Information Service (IFIS) is designed to fill a gap in the range of financial information and data available to investment banks, fund managers and other professionals who depend on reliable information to make the decisions that shape the direction of the industry. ISI Emerging Markets, founded in 1994 is a provider of internet-delivered information on emerging markets globally. Kourouian explained that IFIS provides financial institutions dealing with the sharia-compliant sector with timely industry news from around the world in multiple languages including Arabic and English. "IFIS also allows you to keep up with the latest developments in Sukuk markets and other changes in the quickly growing world of sharia-compliant banking, Kourouian explained. With the availability of sharia-compliant instruments, on the rise in Egypt, the value of products such as IFIS to banking professionals is also increasing. "Not only, are the number of sharia-compliant products are increasing in Egypt, but so too is the quality of their performance, he said. According to the report issued by IFIS, a comparison between conventional and sharia-compliant mutual funds in 2006-2007 in Egypt reveals that the latter have on-par performance versus their conventional counterparts, with one sharia-complaint fund so far at the top of the list of year-to-date returns of these "young Egyptian funds.
