The Arab Banks and FinancialInstitutionsDirectory includes complete and detailed identificationcards forall Arab banking and financial institutions, as wellasArab-foreign joint banks. The Directory presents Informationaboutaddresses, type of activity, main products and services,members ofthe board of directors and top executive management,majorshareholders, main subsidiaries and affiliates,correspondentbanks, main financial indicators for the last fiveyears, number ofemployees and branches both domestic and abroad,and other relevantinformation.The Directory also includes basic economic andbankinginformation about the Arab region, and information about theArabbanking sector. Besides, it also includes information abouttheArab central banks and Arab banking associations and unions.

The catalyst for this dictionary has beenmyown professional need. Lecturing at university level thenworkingin the international finance and banking sectors, and usingtheEnglish, French and Arabic languages, led me to observe the lackofan up-to-date comprehensive, trilingual dictionary of financeandbanking that would be equally practical for professionalandacademic use, especially in the knowledge that existingreferenceswere published decades ago. When lecturing at theUniversity ofOran, Algeria, most of the references were in Frenchand Englishwhile the lectures were delivered in Arabic orFrench.Alternatively, when lecturing at Yarmouk University, Jordan,themain references were in English but domestic sourceswereunderstandably in Arabic and the lectures were delivered inEnglishto an Arab audience. Since joining the Arab Monetary Fund, Ihavenoticed that a field mission to an Arab country could includeanEnglish speaker with absolutely no understanding of Arabic andwithlimited knowledge of French, while the second expert could beaFrench speaker with no understanding of Arabic and withlimitedknowledge of English and ultimately the final mission reporthad tobe drafted in Arabic. While participating in the programme oftheInstitute of Economic Policies, set up by the Arab MonetaryFund, Iobserved that interpreters sometimes mistranslated intoArabic(e.g. “going long” for “long term investment”), whiletraineeswould argue concerning the proper translation of theword“privatization”,Arabic being a rich language there arethreepossible terms depending on whether you are from the Maghreb,theMashrek or the Gulf countries. The same could be said ofotherconcepts such “assets” and “leverage”. These discrepancieswereobvious when I participated, back in 1981, in finalizing “TheArabUnified Guide to Fiscal and Tax Terminology” published bytheCouncil of Arab Economic Unity.This situation convinced me of the urgent need for areliableup-to-date working tool prepared by a professional with anin-depthknowledge of economics, finance and banking who was alsoequallyfluent in all three languagesFurthermore, in recent years, international banking andfinancehave developed tremendously with new fields emerging attheforefront such as Financial Markets, Banking SupervisionandIslamic Banking and Finance to name but a few.Simultaneously,international financial institutions, such as theInternationalMonetary Fund, the World Bank and the World TradeOrganization,have come to play a dominant role in global marketsand havedeveloped their own concepts and jargon which,understandably,could not have been covered by previously-publishedreferences. Addto this the recent accrued world interest in Arabaffairs.This dictionary humbly attempts to fill these gaps. It willprovevery useful for bankers, businessmen, governmentofficials,researchers, negotiators, translators, interpreters,universityprofessors and students of international finance andbanking, bethey English, French or Arabic speakers. For alltheaforementioned, this dictionary will constitute a uniquebridgebetween the English, French and Arabic languages in the fieldoffinance and banking, especially when coupled with itstwinFrench-English-Arabic and Arabic-English-French dictionaries.It isthe result of several years of painstaking research,datacollection, careful comparison of sources and practicalexperience.I feel privileged to have had the unique opportunity ofproducingsuch a valuable reference.This project could not have been completed without sacrificeandespecially without the support and help of my wife, may shefindhere the sincere expression of my appreciation, and mychildren,each one of whom, contributed in his own way, may theyfind here mydeep gratitude. Hoping they share my satisfaction inthe completionof this dictionary just as they shared thepainstaking effort.