Financial Outlook of the OIC Member Countries 2016
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1 BANKING
Banks are the essential elements of a financial system in providing payment tools, saving
instruments and borrowing opportunities. For the least developed countries, banks usually
comprise of almost all the financial system. Therefore, it is important to separately cover
banking for OIC member countries. However, the data for banks in OIC member countries is
difficult to collect and the main source for banks in the world is Bankscope by Bureau van Dijk.
World Bank also relies on this database for bank indicators included in Global Financial
Development Database (World Bank, 2016b). Although Bankscope is a good source to make
comparison study among OIC member countries, there needs to be explanation on how
representative this database is. To this end, a survey has been conducted and reported here.
Bankscope provides accounting information on banks from all over the world. For banks in OIC
member countries, the filtration that is used to identify the banks is as follows:
1- Currently active banks
2- Banks from 57 OIC member countries (note that Bankscope has no bank coverage
from Somalia)
3- Banks from 6 out of 18 specialisation: Chosen specialization fields are 1) Commercial
banks, 2) Savings banks, 3) Cooperative banks, 4) Real Estate & Mortgage banks, 5)
Investment banks, and 6) Islamic banks.1
With this filtration, 968 banks from 56 OIC member countries have been identified. For the list
of the banks, see Appendix I. Table 1 summarizes the number of banks covered in Bankscope
database by country and bank specialisation. Of 6 bank specialisations, commercial banks are
by far the biggest group of banks with 689. There are 155 Islamic banks and 105 investment
banks covered in the database. Somalia is the only country that has no bank coverage among
OIC member countries.
Table 1: Number of Banks Coverage by Countries and Specilisation
Commercial
Banks
Cooperative
Banks
Investment
Banks
Islamic
Banks
Real Estate &
Mortgage Banks
Savings
Banks
Total
Afghanistan 9 0 0 0 0 0 9
Albania 12 0 2 0 0 1 15
Algeria 17 0 0 0 0 0 17
Azerbaijan 26 0 1 0 0 0 27
Bahrain 10 0 6 18 2 0 36
Bangladesh 40 0 1 8 0 0 49
Benin 5 0 1 0 0 0 6
Brunei Darussalam 1 0 0 1 0 0 2
Burkina Faso 6 0 0 0 0 0 6
Cameroon 9 0 0 0 0 0 9
Chad 3 0 0 0 0 0 3
Comoros 1 0 0 0 0 0 1
Cote D'ivoire 12 0 0 0 0 0 12
1 Specialisations that are not included are 1) Other non-banking credit institutions, 2) Specialized governmental credit
institutions, 3) Bank holding & Holding companies, 4) Central banks, 5) Multi-lateral governmental banks, 6) Micro-financing
institutions, 7) Securities firms, 8) Private banking / Asset management companies, 9) Investment & Trust corporations, 10)
Finance companies, 11) Clearing & Custody institutions, and 12) Group finance companies.