The Bahrain Financial Exchange (BFX) has launched its Islamic finance platform, which will allow trading in sharia-compliant securities, trade cash instruments and structured products.

The Bait al-Bursa platform will offer products to both local and international investors.

As part of its initial product offering, the platform will introduce a fully electronic platform known as Etayseer for automating Murabaha transactions.

“Etayseer has been built with the regional market in mind ensuring that its underlying assets are identifiable, and the process flow is fully sharia-compliant, addressing some of the issues in the market today,” read a statement issued by the exchange on 20 October.

“Etayseer offers financial institutions the option to purchase assets directly from asset suppliers to be used for their Murabaha liquidity management transactions in a secure online environment.”  

In July this year, the BFX signed a deal with global index provider FTSE Group to enable the exchange to sell a range of products that will give investors exposure to equities in both developed and emerging markets around the world. 

The products will be based on the following indices: FTSE Emerging, FTSE Europe, FTSE BRIC 50, and FTSE Coast Kuwait 40.

Bahrain already has one stock exchange, the Bahrain Stock Exchange (BSE), with 40 listed companies.