Ranking methodology for Islamic banking sectors – modification of the conventional CAMELS method

Abstract

The state of banking systems is an important issue. The purpose of this paper was to test whether the well-known CAMELS microeconomic methodology, generally used for ranking banks, is applicable to evaluating Islamic banking systems. The hypothesis was tested by implementing a method for a particular case, public, free data – from 2013 till the first quarter of 2018 – on Islamic banking systems from the "Islamic Financial Services Board" (IFBS) database. As expected, modifications were necessary. First, because of the lack of data (in Islamic databases, no data refer to the management ("M")), and second, to avoid the subjectivity of the five-degree method and to reach more sensibility. Thus, a hundred-level (standardized) rating system was introduced – "CAELS 100", where "100" refers to the levels. The other part of the methodology – creating a simple average of the (now level 100) rating of raw indicators to get the letters of CA(M)ELS in the relevant period – remained unchanged. After the data cleaning, only six countries (Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Oman, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates) were able to participate in the analysis. The result showed that Egypt, Turkey and Kuwait were the best ones respectively. Thus, it was concluded that this "CAELS 100" methodology is suitable for evaluating Islamic banking systems.