After the success of IFN Oman Forum in 2017, the forum once again returned to Oman on 13th March 2018. As one of the last GCC nations to join its peers in tapping the Islamic finance industry, Oman has been the hotbed of interest in the GCC region for investors and corporates alike for almost half a decade now. The development of the Islamic finance and banking industry has been an important contributor to the country’s economic growth, with efforts to grow the sector being exercised frequently to compete with its neighbours.
DDCAP Group Executive Director David Testa and DDCAP (DIFC) Limited Director Cassim Docrat were delighted to attend this event, where David was a panellist on the final session of the forum ‘Preparing for the Future: Financial Technology in Oman and GCC Region’, which included a key discussion on what the advancement of technology means for financial institutions in Oman and the Gulf region. Oman is particularly well placed to take advantage of new developments as the Islamic banking sector, both the fully fledged Sharia’a-compliant institutions as well as the Islamic ‘windows’, is relatively new and seems well placed to embrace further developments in FinTech, both ‘disruptors’ and ‘enablers’. David emphasised DDCAP’s own successful track record as a FinTech company, focusing on the transformation in the operating business of the company and in particular its increased use of automation in the form of our asset facilitation platform, ETHOS AFPTM. This in turn has had tangible benefits for its extensive network of banking clients, reducing transactional and documentation lead-in times, with an attendant reduction of the operational risk of the Islamic finance trades in which the company specialises.