The bank has deployed Reval in place of its original in-house application primarily for fair-value hedging of its large portfolio of bond-like instruments, called Sukuk, and for cash flow hedging of its portfolio of deposits.

"As a leading Islamic wholesale Bank with a sizeable leasing business, BLME prudently hedges its exposures to market interest rate volatility using products and structures that enable us to comply with the core tenets of Sharia'a," said Nigel Denison, Executive Director and Head of Markets at BLME. "For example, we use profit rate swaps, which use reciprocal murabaha transactions to create an instrument with the risk management characteristics of a conventional interest rate swap."

"Reval is an industrial strength solution supported by an excellent team of experts," says BLME Treasurer Mark Lynch. "Part of the solution that is of significant benefit to BLME is the advanced regression methodologies that demonstrate the effectiveness of our Sharia'a-compliant hedges and qualify more hedges under IAS 39 accounting rules."

The Islamic finance market has experienced rapid growth with the introduction of sophisticated structures that enable companies to finance themselves in compliance with Sharia'a principles. This growth in turn has led to an increasing demand in complementary products and the creation of an OTC market in Sharia'a-compliant instruments.

"Reval is extremely pleased to be able to partner with a pioneering bank such as BLME to implement an efficient hedging framework that complies with both the core tenets of Sharia'a and international accounting standards," said Nigel Sirett, Managing Director EMEA, Reval.