A Sustainable Financial Model for the Social Banking Business

Abstract

Objective: Most common financial instruments used in social banks include crowdfunding, microfinance, and social business model (excluding dividends). Therefore, one of the social banks (SB) challenges is inadequate and unstable financial resources. This is an important constraint on pursuing their social missions. This study aims to examine the sustainability of financial resources in a social bank implementing Islamic financial instruments such as Ijarah -to give something on rent- and Mozara’ah contract. Mozara’ah is an agreement between the owner of the land and the farmer. The farmer cultivates the land and the produce is divided between the parties in an agreed with fixed-ratio.Methods: The study compares the sustainability of SB cash flow based on Islamic financial instruments such as Ijarah and Mozara’ah with an SB cash flow based on debt facilities such as microfinance using dynamic system simulation. The simulation is done by Vensim software.Results: The results show that the process of cash flow in the SBs with Ijarah and Mozara’ah, enjoys an uptrend. Whereas, the cash flow of SBs with Microfinance reflects the fluctuating behavior. Also, results of the simulation model consisting of Ijarah and Mozara’ah show a rate of return of 13 % in the second year and 20% in the sixth year on deposits which is higher than the interest rate of social banks based on microfinance.Conclusion: According to this research, the SBs using asset-based facilities would be more attractive for depositors in comparison with the SBs using debt-based facilities. So that they can overcome the limitation of access to sustainable financial resources. Therefore, they can be more successful in fulfilling their social mission.

Keywords

• social banking
• sustainable business model
• islamic financial instruments
• dynamic systems