The practice of imposing default rate in Islamic home financing product in Malaysia: Analysis from regulatory and Shariah perspective

In developing and structuring an Islamic banking product, one of the areas that should be addressed is to mitigate risk that includes default risk. Financial institutions will always be exposed to the risk of default by customers. This is faced by Islamic banks as well when granting financing facilities to customers irrespective of the underlying Shariah contracts that apply to the product structure. In order to mitigate such risk, bank normally will impose late payment charges if the instalment amount is not received by the payment due date. In addition to the normal late payment charges, banks may also impose default rate on customers who have defaulted within certain period. As such, this study analysed the practice of charging default rate in Islamic home financing product involving sale- and lease-based contracts. This qualitative study adopted the explanatory methodology as the main method of data collection from relevant documents, such as Shariah-related regulatory policies, Shariah resolution issued by Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM), decided court cases, and Islamic bank product documentation related to the practice of charging default rate. Next, secondary data from journal articles and other published sources, including Shariah literature relevant to this study, were deployed to analyse the said issue. Evidently, several Islamic banks in Malaysia seem to impose default rate in their product structure. Such practice may not be consistent with the spirit of Shariah and Islamic finance if the purpose is to gain more income while the customers face financial issues. This study prescribes Shariah scholars and regulator to re-evaluate the current regulatory policies and product structure to ensure that they embrace the spirit of Shariah, apart from protecting consumers from heightened financial burden.