A dedicated High Court judge has also been assigned to preside over cases relating to Islamic banking and finance, complementing the mediation, arbitration and other dispute resolution mechanism already in existence for the Islamic financial system. 14. Great emphasis has also been given to enhance the Shariah framework in Malaysia. The Shariah Advisory Council in Bank Negara Malaysia is recognised as a sole authority on all Shariah matters pertaining to Islamic banking and finance. At the company level, it is a legal requirement for Islamic banking and takaful operators to establish their own Shariah Committees as part of internal governance in order to ensure compliance with the Shariah. The second focus area is that there must be efforts to have structured human talent development in the area of Islamic finance. 15. The essence of a takaful system lies in the relationship between the participants and the mudharib or wakeel, that is the person responsible for managing the takaful fund. The key success factor lies in takaful operators having high level of expertise in all relevant areas in the management of takaful business including technical, actuarial, distribution, underwriting, investment as well as strong leadership at the helm of a takaful operator. In this regard, there is a need for a structured development of human talent at all levels which include the leaders, technical personnel as well as the regulators.
These reforms have had an immediate and positive impact on the payment card landscape. The cost of payment card acceptance had started to moderate whilst the annual growth of payment card terminals had tripled from 5.4% in 2014 to 18.1% in 2015. In addition to promoting effective competition within the payment industry, it is also important to preserve the neutrality of Payment and Settlement Systems. This includes neutrality among instruments and geo-political interests. This is especially true for global and critical market infrastructure providers such as SWIFT where the offer of services to all parts of the world should be guaranteed and reliable. The emergence of other service providers to fill any void should it happen, would be most unfortunate as it could diminish efficiencies gained from access to global market infrastructures. As a participant-owned institution, adequate safeguards to maintain SWIFT’s neutrality and finality are essential to ensure it continues to serve its mandate as a trusted provider of secure financial messaging services to facilitate global connectivity. Opportunities from greater standardization and interoperability Let me now move on to the need for standardization and interoperability in Payment and Settlement Systems. Proprietary and legacy systems are costly and a source of much inefficiency as time and resources are needed to maintain different systems and facilitate interconnectivity. Hence, there is much value for the financial community to collaborate through greater standardization to facilitate interoperability and innovation to achieve greater economies of scale and network multiplier effects.