Speakers at the 5th AlBaraka Summit in London call for clearer products, greater transparency and evidence of benefits to communities

LONDON, Oct. 13, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Islamic finance needs to win over ordinary UK savers and investors, and the way to do it is to compete on service, value and trust, speakers told the 5th AlBaraka Summit in London today. They added that the industry also has to show who benefits from the money it manages.

H.E. Yousef Hassan Khalawi, Secretary General of AlBaraka Forum for Islamic Economy, opened the summit with a keynote speech at the JW Marriott Grosvenor House, emphasising the importance of ensuring that the principles of fairness and social impact underpin the growth of the Islamic economy, including as new sources of wealth emerge through technologies such as AI. Discussions throughout the day went on to look at how the sector can make its ethical principles visible to customers and communities, from areas such as better service to banking customers to investment that supports jobs, businesses and communities.

The summit’s opening keynotes also included distinguished scholar H.E. Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani, who explained that financial systems must be mindful of interest (riba) and excessive speculation (gharar) and require all wealth creation to be backed by real economic assets rather than money itself. He advocated for structured profit-and-loss sharing models while adapting established Islamic contracts such as Murabahah, alongside instruments and structures such as Sukuk, to the needs of modern finance.

Shakeel Ahmed Yousuf Mohamed, Minister of Housing and Lands, Government of Mauritius, emphasised the importance of effective governance, robust regulatory frameworks, and institutional accountability in upholding the ethical foundations of the Islamic economy and strengthening public trust. He explained: “Good intentions are not enough – ethics need systems and trust must be engineered.” 

Executive Chairperson of Suluh Centre and Social Activist, Nurul Izzah Anwar Ibrahim, drew on Malaysia’s experience to argue for financial institutions built around the practical needs of families and communities. She highlighted the potential for endowments to support long-term social welfare alongside the banking sector, adding: “The current global financial system sells futures that no one can see and bundles risk so no one knows whose house is at the bottom.”

Mohammad Shoaib Memon, Chief Operating Officer, Arab Bank Europe, said: “I don’t think that this is alternate finance anymore. This has to be seen as mainstream finance.” On reaching a wider audience, he emphasised: “We need to make it simple in communication. We need people to understand it better. We need to explain it better.”

Other speakers pointed to pensions, wealth management and digital banking as the best routes to Muslim and non-Muslim customers alike. Clear and plain language and more openness about where funds are invested would be key to earning trust among consumers and investors alike.

The discussions made a connection between Islamic financial principles and the emphasis on fair value, customer understanding and support within the UK’s Consumer Duty, with speakers arguing that the sector should make those benefits easier for customers to recognise when comparing Western finance products with Islamic Finance products.

Alongside the opportunity for growth, speakers challenged Islamic financial institutions to provide stronger evidence of what their financing achieves.

Irshad Mahmood, Islamic Finance Leader and former Head of Islamic Finance and Partner at Deloitte, asked: “Where is that money actually going? Are you using this money for the benefit of the people?” He argued that institutions should assess Sharia compliance, commercial viability and real-world outcomes together. Raising capital successfully should be accompanied by evidence of its contribution to productivity, employment and other economic and social needs.

Muhammad Nassir Salim, President and Chief Executive Officer of Habib Bank Limited (HBL), called for greater transparency for depositors, including clearer explanations of how their funds are deployed, how risk is managed and how returns are shared.

The need for stronger institutional foundations also ran through discussions on regulation and Islamic social finance.

Mohammed Ali Addarrat, Chairman of Libyan Foreign Bank, reflected on Libya’s experience of restricting interest-based banking, warning of the difficulties created when policy changes run ahead of the institutions, skills and financial arrangements needed to implement them.

Mauritius’s Minister of Housing and Lands, Shakeel Ahmed Yousuf Mohamed, set out work to modernise the country’s framework for waqf, or Islamic endowments, including recognition of cash endowments and arrangements for licensing and supervision.

He pointed to London’s institutional strengths as relevant to the development of Islamic social finance, arguing that effective governance and regulation are essential to protecting funds and ensuring they reach their intended beneficiaries.

Held on 13-14 October under the theme Ethics in Action: Rebuilding Foundations and Advancing the Global Impact of the Islamic Economy, the summit brings together policymakers, scholars and financial industry leaders to examine how Islamic economic principles can deliver tangible benefits across markets and communities.

Day one of the summit hosted several thematic panels discussing topics such as:

Policy, Regulation, and Global Direction, chaired by Shockat Adam MP, Independent Member of Parliament for Leicester SouthRebuilding Market Foundations and Expanding Global Impact across Banking, Investment, and Capital Markets, moderated by Nizam Uddin OBE, Senior Advisor, New World GroupStrengthening Social Security through Social Funds and Takaful, hosted by Abdulla Al Hammadi, Assistant Vice President, Moody’s RatingsActivating Waqf, Qard Hasan, Zakat, and Sadaqat for Social Impact, moderated by Sagheer Malik, Group Chief Commercial Officer & Managing Director Home Finance, Offa

The summit’s partners and sponsors include the Islamic Chamber of Commerce and Development (ICCD) as Strategic Partner, Al Baraka Group as Global Partner, Anadolu Agency as Global Communication Partner, Arab Bank Europe as Gold Sponsor, and Libya Africa Investment Portfolio as Silver Sponsor.

About AlBaraka Forum

AlBaraka Forum for Islamic Economy is an independent, non-profit, global think tank, specialising in Islamic economy in its holistic sense. The Forum emerged as an extension of the deep-rooted heritage of its founder, Sheikh Saleh Abdullah Kamel (1941-2020) (may Allah bestow mercy on his soul), a heritage that covered various areas of research and development in Islamic economy.

The Forum seeks to enrich the research resources and serve the knowledge structure of Islamic economy, as well as to build partnerships and alliances with regional and international entities to foresee contemporary economic challenges and developments, in order to keep pace with Islamic economy and finance. This will enhance the outputs of the Forum as a global economic and financial knowledge beacon.

About the AlBaraka Summit Series

AlBaraka Summits Series, founded by Sheikh Saleh Kamel, aims to advance the global reach and impact of Islamic economics and finance. The series began in London, has since expanded to major economic hubs worldwide. It convenes thought leaders and influencers in Islamic economics to discuss timeless fundamentals and contemporary themes, embracing diverse economies from profit-driven enterprises to philanthropic endeavours.

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The strategic investments cap a landmark year of growth for the company, following new funding, league partnerships and a rapid expansion of its programming slate.

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 13, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Just Women’s Sports (JWS), the leading media brand dedicated to women’s sports, today announced three major milestones in a single year of rapid expansion: the launch of the JWS mobile app; the acquisition of Victra Sports, a women’s sports technology company; and the debut of new sport-specific sub-brands in basketball and soccer.

Together, the moves represent the next stage of JWS’s evolution from a media brand into the central digital infrastructure for women’s sports, giving a rapidly-growing fanbase a single destination to follow the games, teams, leagues and stories they care about.

The JWS app is now available on the Apple App Store and Google Play. Download it HERE.

JWS now reaches more than 115 million people each month across its digital and social platforms, with an owned audience of more than 6 million followers. The company’s mission is to build on that scale by onboarding the next 10 million women’s sports fans, creating an accessible entry point for new fans while building deeper products for the audience already driving the industry’s growth.

A new home for women’s sports fans

The JWS app gives fans a dedicated home for live scores, schedules, statistics, personalized accounts, push notifications and JWS’s original editorial and video coverage.

Built on technology acquired through Victra Sports, which was founded by Haro Trenkler and Anna Malepeai, the app goes beyond aggregating information already available elsewhere. It combines JWS’s own content and scoreboard with real-time statistics and analytics, addressing a longstanding gap in how fans are able to follow and understand the games.

“Women’s sports is entering a fundamentally different era,” said Haley Rosen, Founder and CEO of Just Women’s Sports. “More people than ever have access to the games, but the digital experience still hasn’t caught up with the growth of the industry. We’ve spent years building one of the largest audiences in women’s sports. Now we’re building the infrastructure that this audience needs.”

Building brands around individual sports

Alongside the app, JWS is launching Just Women’s Hoops and Just Women’s Football, two new sport-specific brands. Each will feature its own editorial voice, programming and community dedicated exclusively to its sport.

The strategy represents a different approach from legacy sports media companies, which have traditionally built women’s sports verticals within brands organized primarily around men’s sports. JWS is instead expanding from a platform already dedicated entirely to women’s sports, creating specialized brands around the individual sports and fan communities driving the industry forward.

“Other platforms treat the whole of women’s sports as a single bucket,” said Rosen. “We know women’s sports is bigger than that, and launching dedicated communities is a huge step toward building an ecosystem that can serve this entire space.”

Investing in the next era of women’s sports

The announcements cap a landmark year for JWS. The company raised a new funding round, became an official Emerging Media Partner of the WNBA, deepened its longstanding NWSL partnership, and partnered with Monarch Commerce to revamp its merch store.

About Just Women’s Sports

Just Women’s Sports Inc. (JWS) is a digital-first consumer media brand dedicated to 100% women’s sports, 100% of the time. Through original programming, digital media, and editorial coverage, JWS makes it both easy and fun to be a women’s sports fan.

Find Just Women’s Sports on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and at justwomenssports.com.

Press Contact:

Eric Nemeth
justwomenssports.com/

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SOURCE Just Women’s Sports (JWS)

After over a year of Benzinga AI running inside Benzinga Pro, the two companies are taking a combined offering to market, pairing WNSTN’s compliant AI layer with Benzinga’s real-time and historical market data

DETROIT, Oct. 13, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Benzinga, a leading provider of real-time financial news, market data, and financial APIs, today announced an expanded relationship with WNSTN, an AI personalization and engagement platform built for financial institutions. The two companies will go to market together with a combined solution for brokerages, with WNSTN providing the AI intelligence layer and Benzinga providing the real-time and historical data that grounds it.

The expansion builds on a year of collaboration inside Benzinga’s products. Since launching across Benzinga Pro in 2025, Benzinga AI, powered by WNSTN, has delivered natural language chat, news summarization, and market analysis to Benzinga’s base of active traders and financial professionals. The product has generated strong user adoption, including 25x increase in engagement, giving both companies the confidence to take the technology beyond Benzinga and make it available to a broader set of financial platforms.

For brokerages, the offering is designed to shorten the distance between wanting AI in the client experience and being able to defend it internally. WNSTN supplies multiple touchpoints that sit on top of data, including a conversational layer, portfolio-aware personalization, always-on market monitoring, actionable investing ideas, tailored summaries and a compliance agent trained on global regulatory frameworks including FINRA, SEC, CySEC, and MiFID II, with every output routed through that layer before it reaches an end user. Benzinga supplies the underlying market intelligence, including real-time equities news, analyst ratings, earnings and corporate events, SEC filings, and Why Is It Moving explanations of price action, alongside historical archives for retrieval and context.

Data quality has become a practical constraint on financial AI. Models answer confidently regardless of whether the information underneath them is current, correctly attributed, or tagged to the right security, and in a brokerage environment those failures carry regulatory weight. Structured, timestamped, entity-tagged market data reduces that exposure at the retrieval layer, before any guardrail is asked to catch it.

“Most of the failure modes in financial AI trace back to the retrieval layer rather than the model itself,” said Dave Maher, CEO of Benzinga. “If the data arrives late, or without clean timestamps and entity tagging, the output is confidently wrong, and in this industry that gets expensive. Running Benzinga AI on our own feeds inside Benzinga Pro for the past year gave us a live test of that, and answer quality tracked directly to the structure of the data underneath it. WNSTN built the orchestration and compliance layer that makes that structure useful inside a brokerage, so bringing the two to market together was the logical next step.”

The announcement reflects a broader shift in how Benzinga licenses its data. Over the past year the company has expanded its API infrastructure for large language model and retrieval-augmented generation workloads, and established licensing frameworks specifically for AI use cases rather than treating them as exceptions to legacy redistribution terms. Benzinga now licenses content and data to more than 400 clients across 30 countries, a growing share of which are building AI-native products.

“Brokers choose WNSTN because we turn complex market data into something personally relevant, understandable, and actionable for their clients,” said Jamie Rakover, Co-Founder and CRO of WNSTN. “WNSTN doesn’t just summarize information, it digests it, puts it in context, and tailors how it’s delivered to each user. It’s about giving people the right information, at the right time, in the way they can understand it best. That’s how we turn data into action within the broker’s platform, with compliance built into the experience. Benzinga’s real-time and historical coverage strengthens that capability, while its use of WNSTN in Benzinga Pro demonstrates our technology in production with a demanding audience of active traders.”

The impact is measurable. WNSTN’s analysis of one year of data with a U.S. broker-dealer client found that investors who engaged with its AI executed 2.3 times more trades than those who did not, with roughly half of users who interacted with WNSTN chat placing a trade within 24 hours of interacting with the platform.

The combined offering is available to brokerages and financial platforms today, with white-label deployment and API integration options.

About Benzinga

Benzinga is a leading financial media and data technology company that empowers investors with high-quality, real-time market intelligence. Through its news platform, APIs, and data products, Benzinga provides traders, financial institutions, and fintech platforms with the insights they need to make smarter investment decisions. From breaking news and analyst ratings to corporate events and alternative datasets, Benzinga’s tools help market participants stay ahead of the information that drives price movement.

To learn more, visit www.benzinga.com/apis/.

About WNSTN

WNSTN.ai is a compliance-first AI layer for brokerages and financial institutions, enabling real-time personalization, next-best actions, and explainable insights across digital platforms. Built specifically for regulated financial environments, WNSTN combines multi-agent financial intelligence, regulatory controls, layered compliance oversight, and enterprise-grade security to deliver AI experiences that are transparent, audit-ready, and production-safe.

To learn more, visit https://wnstn.ai/.

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SOURCE Benzinga