12. Strategic Assessment of Islamic Fintech in GCC Countries

Recent innovations that the Banking sector has witnessed are in the areas of Financial Technologies, Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain. The real investment opportunity for GCC countries is in the underlying innovative applications of Blockchain. The coming years could be pivotal in accelerating the transformation into more strategically focused, technologically modern, and operationally agile Islamic banking so that all stakeholders remain healthy in a rapidly evolving ecosystem. It is high time Islamic banks embrace disruptive technologies and accelerate their digitization efforts in a manner that would be difficult to achieve with a legacy, centralized approach. It is an open question for the Islamic finance industry as to whether the current practice of central authorities is desirable in the future or whether distributed systems using mathematics and cryptography to guarantee integrity are a better alternative. There is also a chance that a future state may evolve which requires both forms of processing.