SWIFT has announced that ISO 15022 message standards for the processing of treasury murabaha transactions have been certified compliant with the international Islamic finance standards issued by AAOIFI (Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions). This certification paves the way towards the automated processing of murabaha treasury transactions, said to represent 60 percent of all Islamic financing.

Murabaha includes money transfer and commodity trade. While SWIFT has carried the money transfer for many years, commodity trade has been completed manually, usually by fax without any globally agreed standard. SWIFT’s solution uses the ISO 15022 message standards within the guidelines of a murabaha standards rulebook

More than 240 Islamic banks representing 84 percent of global Sharia compliant assets are members of SWIFT. Islamic finance is growing at more than 20 percent per annum, and the demand for Shariacompliant messaging standards is increasing as a result. SWIFT is working with the Islamic financial community to address this demand, both at the level of individual banks, and with organizations such as AAOIFI and AIBIM (the Association of Islamic Banking Institutions Malaysia).