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Best assurance and advisory firm
Several of the big advisory groups are strong in Islamic finance – Ernst & Young, for example, produces some of the best research – but it is hard to compete with the reach and deep-seated involvement in Islamic finance internationally that KPMG can boast.
Here’s an example. In 2011 the Sultan of Oman issued a royal directive that should ultimately lead to the establishment of Islamic finance in the sultanate. KPMG swiftly bulked up its Omani firm, hired former DIFC Islamic finance director Khalid Yousaf to spearhead it, and consequently was appointed by the Oman government to help the finance ministry create an enabling tax framework for Islamic finance. It has also been appointed auditor to Oman’s first stand-alone Islamic bank and is helping set up Islamic windows for foreign banks.
That’s typical of the approach and it is visible all over the world, from KPMG’s role on the first sukuk from Kazakhstan to the establishment of a new Islamic business advisory services department in Malaysia and the steady development of the Shariah compliance review business that was launched in 2011. The client list is extraordinarily comprehensive: from developed markets such as the UK and Luxembourg to frontiers in Afghanistan, Uganda and Azerbaijan, via established heavyweights in Malaysia and the Middle East. KPMG people appear at the highest levels of the industry: Jalil al-Aali, chairman of the Accounting Standards Committee of the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI), is from KPMG Bahrain, while Samer Hijazi, from KPMG UK, chairs the UK Islamic Finance Accounting Sub-Group, part of CityUK.
