Morocco’s Central Bank, Bank al-Maghrib (BAM), is joining the growing trend in embracing sharia-compliant finance. For some time, regulators had outlawed banks from offering such products. However, earlier this year, the Central Bank announced that it would be legal for banks to offer a range of “alternative finance” options to their clients from July. There has been a considerable amount of pressure from the private sector for the Central Bank to allow sharia-compliant, or “Islamic” finance, a fast-growing sector worth $500 billion a year internationally according to Standard & Poor’s. sharia-compliant finance is particularly popular in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region, the largest investor group in Morocco, but institutions also exist in many non-Muslim countries. More than 270 sharia-compliant finance institutions operate in 80 countries, and Standard & Poor’s estimates that compliant banks have around a 12% market share in Malaysia and 17% in the GCC area. A recent
