IslamicFinance.de

“The Islamic fund industry needs to evaluate new strategies to restimulate growth. Islamic fund assets remained flat in 2009 at $52 billion, whereas the potential wealth pool grew by 20 percent, now estimated at $480 billion,” concludes the Islamic Funds & Investments Report (IFIR) 2010.
The other key messages from the IFIR similarly are stark — the sector needs to achieve scale to ensure its long-term sustainability; the priority over the next two years is to rebuild investor trust through staying close to the investor base and to have transparency in cost and revenue structures.
The IFIR 2010 may serve a purpose to those interested in the Islamic funds industry. But it could have been much more useful if it had clarity in structure; concentration on the 3 major markets by far; in-depth analysis not only of the performances but also of the shortcomings — both regulatory, legal, management, investor knowledge, asset allocation etc; and above all a much more rigorous empirical approach in primary data collection which would have given the analysts at Ernst & Young to draw much more authoritative conclusions about the global Islamic fund and investment industry.
This is unfortunate because this remains a lost opportunity for Ernst & Young in a market segment that is notorious for its outrageous lack of serious and reliable independent information, data and analysis.