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Name: |
Mohd Shaharul KN Zain
Head, Market Development Bond Pricing Agency Malaysia Kuala Lumpur 39 Malaysian |
Could you provide a brief journey of how you arrived where you are today? It was a small project team of around five Malaysians and a team of IT developers from Korea. Everything essentially had to be done from scratch as we were the first to do such a thing in Malaysia, which meant a lot of challenges along the way. We got our first customer in mid-2005 and obtained our bond pricing agency (BPA) status from the Securities Commission Malaysia in January 2006. We changed our name to Bond Pricing Agency Malaysia (BPAM) in December last year to better reflect our core competency. What does your role involve? What is your greatest achievement to date? Which of your products/services deliver the best results? We have since derived a number of other valuation- and data-based products to meet client needs, among them our recently launched series of Bond Indices called FiiX. What are the strengths of your business? What are the factors contributing to the success of your company? Also, the increasing importance of strong risk management frameworks in financial institutions has meant good demand for our data. The fact that Malaysia is the largest Sukuk issuer in the world has meant that more than 60% of our output covers this class on instruments. We foresee that the data needed for valuation and risk management of such products will remain one of our key business drivers. What are the obstacles faced in running your business today? Just like everyone else, we too will face in the medium term our clients dealing with cutbacks and tighter margins. Nevertheless, we will have to maintain the same high quality of data that is expected of us. Where do you see the Islamic finance industry in, say, the next five years? How it is in five years depends on how well the players in the industry continue to innovate, but what is a key prerequisite is a unified, globally accepted set of standards as the bedrock. Name one thing you would like to see change in the world of Islamic finance? |