According to the related people's statements, the capital of the Ziraat Participation Bank, which will be opened on May 29th, had been acquired from the Treasury as TL in exchange for 300 million US Dollars. This year 20 branches will be opened; congratulations everyone, may it be fruitful!
Ziraat Bank obtained the necessary permissions from BDDK, the state Bank Auditing and Regulating Association, last October and thus possesses the specialty of being the first public bank that will implement the participation banking method.
As Mr. Ünsal Ban, one of our newspaper's writers, has written in his article yesterday; “the financial crisis in the world was causing the perceptions related with its originating point, the banking sector, to completely change, while providing new pursuits to be sought from the point of the sector. During this pursuit process, the participation banking model, which is quite popular in Muslim countries, was coming to the fore. The studies after the mortgage crisis in 2007 (Pappas v.d., 2012; Cihak ve Hesse, 2010; Beck v.d., 2012), shows that in comparison to the conventional banking, participation banking has a more resistant structure against financial crises. In the same way, we can see, as a common discovery, that the essence of the financial instruments possessed in participation banking is more solid and trustable.”
Today, in our country we have four participation banks that are active with their 990 branches and 17.000 employee. In the future, this number will increase to 7 after Ziraat Participation Bank, Halkbank and Vakıfbank are added in that list.
According to the believers, who believe that interest is illicit and that something forbidden by the religion will generally be harmful and useless even if it has certain useful points, we needed institutions that will perform all the banking activities without interest and in accordance with Islamic Rules. With the same belief and justifications, it was also necessary to actualize the insurance enterprises that are based on the mutual cooperation and unity (takaful) principal as an alternative to the commercial-premium insurance activities. In our country, participation banks (without interest, Islamic banks) had been established starting from 1985, and for the last couple of years, the actualization of insurance enterprises based on the takaful principal is on the way. Public's conscious support and political willpower contributed to these developments.
Let us summarize the place and importance of these no-interest banks in the sense of the country's and nation's benefit, as well as the religion and belief- based justification, over Ban's article;
“The proliferation of the participation banking will be paving the way for innovativeness from the point of capital markets.
The no-interest working model will provide development in the partnership based investment hands.
As the structure expanded during the process, the functionality of the financial mediation mechanism will increase and this situation will cause a positive effect over the potential economic growth level.
It will also become possible for the partnership-based new financial options to provide new instruments to the capital markets over wealth charter companies.
Thus, a wider community, who are sensitive on the matter of interest, will be addressed, and the fund gathering potential of the entrepreneurs in our country will increase.”
