Banking & Finance

Introduction by Executive Editors When the Council of Ministers approved an economic reform program at the end of April, 2020, then-Prime Minister Hassan Diab hailed the plan with the epithet…

Alternative medicine has been sitting in the shadow of traditional, Western medicine for some time in Lebanon: alternative medicine. Though it is not controversial, alternative medicine is still seen as…

In March 2017, The Economist reported that Intel, the giant American chipmaker, paid $15.3 billion for Mobileye, an Israeli firm at the forefront of developing autonomous-car technology. The deal was…

The Alpha Report by Bankdata Financial Services covers 14 banks, each of which have deposits exceeding $2 billion and collectively represent the lion’s share of banking activity—holding 87 percent of…

Home loans account for more than a quarter of local banks’ private sector lending. This is in large part thanks to subsidized loans from Banque du Liban (BDL), Lebanon’s central…

The Lebanese insurance industry seems to be in need of new energy. Not only in terms of its objective to participate in the covers of the future oil and gas…

The profitability of alpha banks – those with deposits above $2 billion – has grown in the third quarter of 2016 when measured by the improved return on average equity…

When compared with the banking sector and the initiatives taken by Banque du Liban (BDL), the year was unnervingly quiet for the country’s insurance industry. Preliminary information on the performance…

Oussama Kaissi is the chief executive officer of the Islamic Corporation for the Insurance of Investment and Export Credit (ICEIC), the insurance arm of the Islamic Development Bank (IDB). The…

It is understandable that Freddie Baz, the chief strategist of Lebanon’s largest bank, Bank Audi, presented a divergent view from the central bank’s narrative explaining the latter’s financial engineering (see…