Islamic Bank Specificities and Basel III Regulation

This paper investigates the characteristics of Islamic banks by comparing them with those of conventional banks. Islamic banks’ depositors are supporting higher risks. This will help to know how various ratios proposed by the Basel III regulatory framework could be amended to be appropriate for Islamic banks. The article shows the difficulties of such a generalization of the international regulation to Islamic banks. By focusing on the risk-adjusted capital ratio and the leverage ratio, which are the only ratios which can be calculated for Islamic banks, we show empirically that Islamic banks are much better capitalized than conventional banks and should more easily comply with the new capital constraints proposed by the Basel III accords.