That Austrade thing

In the interests of completeness for this particular blog, we should make some mention of the Austrade funded Islamic Finance in Australia report. The report is altogether rather neat (you can judge for yourself and download a copy from here) and covers a fair amount of ground over its 40 pages. This was the report that launched by Senator Simon Crean in Melbourne back in February.

The interesting part of the report is the eight pages in the middle in a section called ‘Opportunities in Australia’. As the report says, ‘Islamic finance is still a nascent industry in Australia but has great potential for development given Australia’s abundant resources and its strategic location in, and strong trade links with, the fastest growing region in the world. It has the potential to facilitate further innovation and competition in the wholesale and retail banking sectors and to support the Australian Government’s commitment towards credit market diversification’.

The real cherry in the pie, of course, is in the wholesale Islamic investment banking business – and the retail market is not likely to see much growth because it may never have sufficient scale in Australia – and this is reflected in the content of the report. The report was written in large part by John Masters formerly of PricewaterhouseCoopers.