Tech is disrupting the conventional banking sector from back office core banking to customer-facing processes. Islamic banking is no different. Wael Malkawi, executive director at ICS Financial Systems (ICSFS), spoke with IBS Intelligence about how technology has disrupted Islamic banks in recent years.

How has Islamic banking evolved/changed in the past few years?

Client onboarding has become a key strategic focus for many financial institutions, driven by the need to reduce costs, increase efficiencies and manage risk. As the pace of change increases, it is critical to understand which initiatives banks should be prioritising in order to meet their goals.

Today Chase, the largest co-brand card issuer, and Air Canada, Canada’s largest airline and a Star Alliance founding member, announced a strategic partnership that will make Chase the exclusive issuer of the airline’s Aeroplan U.S. credit card. As a part of this partnership, Mastercard will become the exclusive payments network for the new offering in the U.S.

Leverate, an innovative software as a service provider for foreign exchange brokers, is today announcing its collaboration with Sumsub, an identity verification platform that covers KYC/KYB/AML needs. Both companies will work together to provide quick and reliable KYC and chargeback protection checks for Leverate’s SaaS based trading platforms worldwide.

Salesforce, [NYSE: CRM], the global leader in CRM, today announced SalesforceHyperforce, a reimagination of the company’s platform architecture built to securely and reliably deliver the Salesforce Customer 360, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Industries and more, on major public clouds.

Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX), the world's digital infrastructure company, has launched a report: ‘The Future of Banking-as-a-Service’. It includes in-depth analysis and findings on how industry attitudes towards BaaS have changed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Leading UK anti-money laundering (AML) firm SmartSearch expanded its senior team with three new appointments in November. The recruitment reflects the continuing growth of the Ilkley-based business which has also broken into new international markets this year.

The roles of vice president of customer success, head of sales and enterprise development manager have been created in response to the increasing demand for the award-winning solution.

Path Solutions has been named winner of the ‘Best Islamic Banking Implementation’ category following its successful implementation of iMAL at Al Baraka Banking Group in the IBSI Global FinTech Innovation Awards 2020.

Copenhagen-based startup Dreamdata has today announced it has closed a $4.4M investment round to help B2B companies drive growth by better connecting their marketing and growth activities with revenue generation.

B2Bs operate in an incredibly complex world. There are numerous stakeholders involved in decision making, while negotiations are spread out over months or even years. This means there is little transparency into which commercial activity impacted the process and which were least efficient.

Propel, one of the UK’s largest independent finance houses, has launched Propeller, a revolutionary new online asset finance portal developed to power vendors’ sales and redefine the customer finance journey.