As the Fintech evolution transforms the banking sectors worldwide, the players in the market are hard-pressed to experiment the tremendous opportunities that the application of the likes of Blockchain, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence et cetera would have on the financial world. As the volume of the data continue to expand, the possibilities that this raw data materializes in the form of opportunities lean towards limitless. Organizations such as financial institutions must be vigilant of the prospects that such data can reveal and the extend of leverage that they can exercise to build insights for their consumers, products, and services. Big data analytics have alone become the driving force for digital innovations and transformation of banks.

This chapter explores the economic and social impacts of sovereign sukuk in Sudan and its unique challenges. The first of its kind, this research collected primary data from different groups of investors of Sudanese governmental sukuk. Adopting a qualitative approach (interview questions and open and closed-ended surveys), four sets of questions were distributed to four groups (individual investors, institutional investors, government officials, and academics). The survey found that despite sukuk's influence in activating the economy and financial markets, and encouraging savings awareness, the market in Sudan is facing many challenges. Accordingly, it is recommended that sukuk issuances should appeal to a wider audience including retail investors. The ensuing system, which could likewise be adopted by other countries, would generate more liquidity for development projects and may prove helpful for developed sukuk markets. Additionally, evolving capital markets would enhance the economic and social impact of governmental sukuk.

This paper examines the effectiveness of the bank lending channel in a dual banking system in Malaysia, where both conventional and Islamic banks operate alongside each other. It also investigates the impact of bank competition on lending channels in financial systems. Using panel data from both Islamic and conventional banks in Malaysia, our findings indicate the ineffectiveness of the bank lending channel. Further, the empirical results suggest that the impact of monetary policy on bank lending does not depend on bank competition. In other words, the effectiveness of the lending transmission channel does not depend on the market power of the individual banks. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the lending channel appears to be independent of whether the bank is Islamic or conventional. This result is probably explained by the fact that the vast majority of Islamic banks in Malaysia are subsidiaries of conventional banks. Policymakers therefore do not need to differentiate between conventional and Islamic banks in regard to the effectiveness of the bank lending channel.

The practice of Islamic banking has become a fast growing and widespread phenomenon, not only in the Muslim countries, but also in the Non-Muslim countries too, such as UK, USA, Canada and Singapore. The transformation from a conventional form of banking to a banking system based on interest-free banks has generated a great deal of interest to call for Human Capital Development in the field to ensure sustainability, good performance and good competitive market in the Islamic financial industry. Even though Sudan is the pioneer in taking the initiative of Islamizing its financial industry since 1980s, yet we realized that other countries are taking the leading international and regional hub of Islamic finance such as Malaysia in the Asian region and UK in European countries, and recently Canada is also calling to become one of the hub of Islamic finance in the far west. Africa is also highly expected to host many Islamic financial institutions in the near future as there is a great demand for the Islamic financial products. This urged the authors to shed some light on the role of Sudan Academy for Banking and Financial Sciences and its vision to become a hub for Human Capital Development and in promoting Islamic Finance not only in the African region but also in the Arab countries too.

This thesis examines the relationship between bank competition and financial intermediation cost in the dual banking system. In literature, such relationship has been substantially studied for the conventional banking system. Yet, exploring it in dual system is still missing. This examination is important for two main reasons. First, the changing market structure within the dual banking jurisdictions and its sequences on various banking aspects. Second, the high intermediation cost of Islamic banks compared to their conventional peers, which is well documented in literature, and the possible role of changes in market structure on such cost. By leveraging on a sample of 387 commercial banks (85 of them are Islamic) from 12 dual banking jurisdictions across 20 years (1999-2018), this empirical study tries to fill an important research gap in the dual banking system literature by studying the impact of bank competition on financial intermediation cost, represented by bank margin, within dual banking system from three main perspectives.