GBST awarded global banking gong

Australian wealth management and advice platform developer GBST has been recognised for its innovations in Islamic finance, taking home a 2024 Digital Banking Award from UK-based financial technology research and advisory firm IBS Intelligence (IBSi).

Co-winner of the Islamic Banking & Wealth Management category, the award recognised GBST’s successful collaboration with Crescent Finance, a Sydney-based Islamic home leading organisation. Crescent has since been rebranded as ‘Salaam’.

Among a number of solutions implemented by GBST for Salaam was the development and deployment of multiple online calculators.

GBST boasts that the new capabilities, deployed in just two months, provide an enhanced digital experience for Salaam customers, offering “user-friendly retirement planning, borrowing power, loan assessment, and extra repayment loan tools, all aligned with Shariah-compliant principles”.

“These calculators integrate seamlessly into Salaam’s websites and empower users to make informed financial decisions while adhering to Islamic finance principles,” GBST wrote.

The calculators are also updated regularly to align with yearly legislative changes, including superannuation rates of return and government updates.

Alongside the calculators, GBST also deployed a complementary Content Management Solution (CMS) for Salaam, enabling the lender to edit and customise field labels, rates, and text in the calculators, without incurring additional external costs.

“We prioritised accessibility in our design, replacing sliders with more user-friendly drop downs and input fields, and incorporated graphs and visual illustrations into the calculators, providing a simple but visually effective way to interpret results”, said Brianna Dobing, GBST’s head of digital.

“We understood from the outset the importance of accommodating Salaam’s specific terminology and branding requirements, working closely with Salaam to ensure our calculators would seamlessly integrate with their Shariah-compliant financial products and services,” she added.

In its fourth edition, the 2024 IBSi Digital Banking Awards recognise technology developers, banking-as-a-service (BaaS) providers, digital banks, and neo-challenger banks for excellence in banking technology implementations and innovations using emerging technologies.

This year’s Awards evaluated more than 60 digital finance installations across multiple geographies.

“The Digital Banking Awards epitomise the transformative shift in banking, celebrating both digital pioneers and traditional institutions for their adaptability and innovation,” said Nikhil Gokhale, director – research and digital properties at IBS.