Essays on RegTech and SupTech in Islamic Finance

Abstract

The World Economic Forum's annual global risk perception reports, since 2016, consistently underscore growing interconnection of economic risk with environmental, geopolitical, and technological risks. Generally, the economic risk ought to be internal to the financial sector, while the environmental, geopolitical, and technological risks are deemed to be external to it. Often the external risks serve as triggers for internal risk entailing market disruptions as evidenced in COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic significantly disrupted the stability of the worldwide financial sector demanding immediate stabilization of the economy. The pandemic also demanded internalization of the externalities, especially the environmental risks, to avoid the recourse of such disruptions in future. In this context, the first study of this PhD dissertation in mid-2020 found that excess liquidity in Islamic banks and the resilience of Zakat and endowment institutions in Qatar hold potential to reinforce economic stability in the state of Qatar, but traditional regulatory frameworks constrain unleashing the potential. Consequently, the research shifted toward technology-enabled regulation. Subsequent studies examined the value-added dimensions of RegTech, mapped well-researched and underexplored areas, and developed a prototype to assess the reliability and credibility of ORION and IRSHAD as SupTech and RegTech solutions within Islamic finance. Traditionally financial regulation prioritizes stability concerns over sustainability, creating a gap between policy mandates of sustainability and supervisory tools focused on stability. Therefore, this dissertation fills that gap by advancing a framework for operationalizing sustainability objectives within the regulated financial sector. The last two chapters identifies ESG-based regulatory objectives that facilitate the integration of the SDGs into financial regulation, thereby expanding the functional scope of RegTech and SupTech in support of a sustainable and resilient financial ecosystem. Moving beyond the prevailing focus on financial stability, the chapters advance an extended RegTech and SupTech framework that incorporates social responsibility and environmental sustainability. The identified KPIs may serve as the basis for developing an Integrated Sustainability Assessment Platform (ISAP). Such ISAP may complement financial Inclusion, Stability, Integrity and Protection (I-SIP) objectives of regulators and can holistically evaluate the financial sector’s performance in terms of financial stability, social responsibility, and environmental sustainability.

Date of Award	2026
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	HBKU College of Islamic Studies