Turkey’s participation banks, as Islamic banks are called in the country, outperformed the overall banking sector in 2019.

Net income of the six participation banks grew to 2.433 billion liras ($406.6 million) last year compared to 2.097 billion liras in 2018, according to data from the Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency (BDDK) released on Jan 30. This represents a growth of 16%, according to Salaam Gateway calculation.

This increase outperformed the banking sector overall that saw an 8.07% decrease in profit, from 54.123 billion liras in 2018 to 49.753 billion liras in 2019.

Participation banks’ asset growth was also higher than the banking sector’s.

The Shariah-compliant banks’ assets grew by 37.57% to 284.45 billion liras ($47.54 billion) in 2019 from 206.931 billion liras in 2018.

Comparatively, the overall banking sector gained 16.14% increase in assets to 4.491 trillion liras in 2019 versus 3.867 trillion liras in 2018.

The market share of participation banks by assets jumped to 6.3% at the end of 2019 from 5.3% in 2018.

There was also a 2.5% increase in the number of participation banks staff in 2019, 16,040 versus 15,654 the year before, according to data from the Participation Banks Association of Turkey (TKKB).

The overall banking sector saw a shrinking of its workforce by 1.5%, from 207,716 in 2018 to 204,626 in 2019.

51 banks operated in Turkey in 2019, six of which were participation banks.

($1 = 5.9838 Turkish liras)

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