Shortly after the sun rises over the desert dunes in the barren east, Dubai’s neon-lined highways and space-age skyscrapers are bathed in color – the gold, green and silver prisms splaying a spectrum into the Arabian Gulf beyond. All the way to the horizon the Sheikh Zayed Road, a gargantuan roaring river of multi-laned asphalt, begins feeding the city’s office towers with workers.
On a January morning in 2011, Bilal parks his car in the underground car park of the Dubai International Financial Center, takes the lift up to the marble foyer and swipes his security card at the turnstile. Through the glass door of his investment bank’s trading floor is an open-plan office, laid out as a miniaturized version of its big brother in London. The room is dominated by two plasma screens: one permanently tuned to the digitized ticker tape of Bloomberg Television, the other directly facing the open-plan office and displaying a live webcam feed from their colleagues’ desks in London. This morning Bilal has arrived earlier than his Dubai co-workers – the salesmen and -women of the bank’s emerging markets team – and so the chaotic hubbub of simultaneous conversations on a bank of trader-phones is yet to begin.
In the quiet moments before they arrive, Bilal fills his coffee mug and collects his thoughts in preparation for the day ahead. The past few weeks have been difficult. The bank’s financial position remains precarious in the middle of the worst economic downturn in living memory. Rumors have been circulating of mass redundancies.
‘A rainmaker in the Islamic finance market’: that’s what they dubbed Bilal when his bosses hired him two years ago. But like the wider banking industry, tumbleweeds have been blowing through the Islamic finance industry for the past couple of years and capricious bosses in London have blown hot and cold on the need for the bank to invest in this frontier market. Can we afford this luxury? Should we devote resources to understanding it? Or should we retrench to what we know best?
Bilal logs in and, almost as if in answer to his concerns, an email pops up. It’s good news. An Islamic deal that the bank closed last year has just been awarded one of the industry’s leading accolades. It is the first time that an independent body has recognized the bank’s contribution to the Islamic finance industry and, as such, is a vindication of the effort of his team.
If the Islamic finance market is about to turn the corner, then this bank will be at the forefront. Perhaps today is going to be a good day.
Bilal settles into the day’s work. His firm is in the process of setting up a vast platform, a factory of financial products that conform with Islamic law. The output from this factory will be sold to high net worth individuals and financial institutions in the Middle East, all looking for investments that conform to their religious beliefs. At the same time, Bilal’s team is working with banks throughout the Middle East and Southeast Asia to establish itself as their preferred banking counterparty on large transactions: currency trades, commodity investments, and ‘swap’ contracts to lubricate the cogs of the fastest growing segment of the world’s finance industry. It is an enormous undertaking and one that he hopes will propel his firm up the industry league tables. But does the bank’s senior management team in London believe that?
Bilal’s BlackBerry rings from a number he doesn’t recognize. It is the head of HR asking him to step into the conference room. He sighs and silently shakes his head – this morning’s email arrived too late to make a difference. He knows what this call means and resigns himself to the conversation that is about to take place. Ironically his last act as an employee is to send an email to his colleagues congratulating them on the award. He collects a few personal items and picks up his briefcase.