28/09/2026
The UAE wants local Islamic finance assets at AED 2.56 trillion by 2031. Islamic bank assets stood at AED 1.4 trillion in June 2026.
Closing that gap is not only a capital problem. It is a systems problem.
On 30 September, Al Masraf and the UAE Banks Federation will host the first conference on how financial institutions will implement the national Islamic Finance and Halal Industry Strategy. One of its four sessions covers FinTech and digital platforms. Here is why that session matters.
Five technology gaps that stand between the strategy and its targets:
1. Shari'ah compliance reporting is still manual.
Audit trails live in spreadsheets and email threads. When the Shari'ah board or the regulator asks a question, someone rebuilds the answer by hand.
2. Islamic products sit outside the core system.
Murabaha, Ijara and Wakala are often modelled as workarounds inside conventional ERP or lending tools. Every product change means custom patching.
3. Sukuk issuance is paper-heavy.
Structuring, investor allocation and periodic distributions still run on documents rather than workflows. The strategy targets AED 660 billion in local sukuk issuance. That volume does not scale on PDFs.
4. Waqf and zakat funds are tracked, not managed.
Endowment inflows, beneficiary payouts and impact reporting rarely sit in one system, so every report to donors or regulators starts from scratch.
5. Investor and customer onboarding creates friction.
Identity verification, Shari'ah eligibility checks and document collection are split across disconnected tools, and drop-off follows.
None of these gaps needs a new regulation. They need integrated systems: ERP built around Islamic contract structures, compliance dashboards that report in real time, and onboarding flows that treat Shari'ah rules as configuration, not as manual review.
These are the capabilities BiztechCS brings to finance teams: ERP customisation, workflow automation, analytics dashboards and system integration.
Which of these five would you fix first?