The Bahrain Financial Exchange (BFX), the first multi-asset exchange in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, said that Elaf Bank, a wholesale Islamic bank licensed by the Central Bank of Bahrain, has become a registered user of Bait Al Bursa, the Islamic finance division of the BFX.
Bait Al Bursa, an innovative and comprehensive platform, will complement the broad scope of Elaf Bank’s core business offerings. Elaf Bank provides a wide range of financial services involving fund-raising advisory, asset management, mergers and acquisitions, treasury, liquidity management, foreign exchange, investment, structured products and derivatives. The initial stage of the partnership will focus on the BFX’s Murabaha liquidity management platform, e-Tayseer.
“Joining BFX’s Bait Al Bursa division brings a wide range of opportunities to Elaf Bank’s stakeholders. Of our immediate aims is to streamline all our Murabaha transactions through the Exchange’s liquidity engine e-Tayseer. In parallel, we will be working closely with the BFX Bait Al Bursa division in shaping up the next stage of Islamic products that the Exchange is planning to launch and to work jointly on developing the secondary market for better liquidity management in Islamic banks,” Dr. Jamil El Jaroudi, Chief Executive Officer, said.
“This partnership demonstrates the diversity of the BFX’s products portfolio that provides opportunities to the widest range of financial institutions both conventional and Islamic, which having different objectives and targeting different markets can only benefit from the BFX’s multi-asset offerings. We welcome Elaf Bank to the BFX network and we are prepared for more firms to join from our region and beyond,” Arshad Khan, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the BFX and the BFX Clearing and Depository Corporation (BCDC), said.
e-Tayseer, the first product of Bait Al Bursa, has been built with the regional MENA market in mind ensuring that its underlying assets are identifiable, and the process flow is fully Shariah-compliant to meet the current requirements of the market and fill the necessary gaps. e-Tayseer offers financial institutions the option to purchase assets directly from asset suppliers based in the GCC region to be used for their Murabaha liquidity management transactions in a secure online environment. With advanced automated features, e-Tayseer makes scheduling and execution of Murabaha transactions more streamlined and afford its users the benefit of reduced trade cycles and manual paperwork procedures.