Comparative analysis of Saudi sharia compliant banks: A CAMEL framework

Abstract

A vibrant banking sector remains instrumental to the stability of every economy. Islamic banks are now considered as iris spuria of the banking industry. Countries such as Saudi Arabia have been hailed as the Islamic banking basin. Nevertheless, how well is this sector growing and performing in Saudi Arabia itself? This motivates us to carry out this study. The current study's key objective was to measure Sharia-compliant banks' efficiency on the CAMEL Framework, a commonly accepted framework for banks' financial health. CAMEL is fundamentally an acronym for which the first letter from the five primary segments of a bank operation is jumbled, i.e. “|C|apital adequacy, |A|sset quality, |M|anagement quality, |E|arnings ability and |L|iquidity”. The system is popularly being used for determining the financial soundness and stability of banks. The current study employs this framework to judge the financial performance of four fully Sharia compliant banks or Islamic banks in Saudi Arabia. The publicly accessible audited data of these banks over ten years was taken for analysis. From the final results of the analysis, it is found that all the banks performed stupendously well on the CAMEL framework. AlRajhi Bank was rated number one of all four Sharia-compliant banks. However other three banks namely Alinma Bank, AlBilad Bank, and Aljazeera bank have also done well and overachieved all the criterion of CAMEL's ranking. However, the study proposes a comparison of Sharia-compliant banks with conventional commercial banks. Moreover, it recommended that more banks should engage in offerings of Sharia based products.