Financial Outlook of the OIC Member Countries 2017
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4. FINANCIAL COOPERATION UNDER THE COMCEC
The financial cooperation area has a great potential for the socio-economic development of the
OIC member countries. However, this potential has not been fully utilized due to several
reasons. First of all, the majority of the OIC Member States’ financial markets are not working
efficiently to support a sustainable economic growth and development, and this issue
especially affects the low and lower-middle income OIC member countries adversely. In
addition, various economic and financial difficulties such as the small size of their financial
markets, lack of diversified financial products and inefficiency of their financial institutions
have adverse effects on the economic development. In this regard, financial cooperation has
emerged an important area for the COMCEC to help the Member States to overcome the issues
in this area.
The ideas for enhancing financial cooperation under the COMCEC date back to its initial
meetings. The Cooperation efforts in this area have been intensified and deepened in recent
years. The COMCEC Strategy, adopted by the 4th Extraordinary Islamic Summit in 2012,
defined finance as one of the cooperation areas of COMCEC. Furthermore, there are also
several on-going efforts in this field such as cooperation among the Stock Exchanges Forum,
COMCEC Capital Markets Regulators Forum and the Meetings of Central Banks and Monetary
Authorities.
4.1 THE COMCEC STRATEGY: FINANCIAL COOPERATION
COMCEC Strategy defines “deepening financial cooperation among the member countries” as
the strategic objective of the COMCEC in this field. The Strategy identifies, “Regulatory and
Supervisory Cooperation”, “Capital Flows”, “Visibility of Financial Markets”, “Training, R&D
Activities and Statistics” as output areas in its finance section and specifies several expected
outcomes under each of them.
4.1.1 REGULATORY AND SUPERVISIORY COOPERATION
COMCEC aims to help improve the quality of regulation, supervision and cooperation among
regulatory and supervisory bodies in the OIC Member States. The expected outcomes defined
by the Strategy are as follows:
 Developed legal, regulatory and institutional framework,
 More standardized contracts and more harmonized regulations,
 Converged listing requirements, trading rules and technical infrastructure,
 Strengthened arbitration procedures, credit information and credit registry system,
risk measurement and risk management systems.