The recent financial crisis has significantly damaged the global financial industry's image, particularly affecting the image of interest-bearing assets as well as the regulatory framework of central banks. As a result, new ways of doing finance have developed, creating alternatives to the regular financial system. These alternatives include ethical banking, which prohibits certain practices, such as, insider trading, bribery, discrimination, money laundering, and fraud; non-banking solutions, a method of intermediating money as an alternative to interest-based loans; and Islamic finance, an alternative method to interest-based loans which prohibits interest-based loans, something that is considered central to the conventional financial system.

This book explores each of these non-conventional banking and financing mechanisms in detail, with case studies from distinguished experts in higher education institutions, asset management firms, non-profit, multilateral and international organizations, and includes examples from Egypt, Spain, the United States, Sweden, and Indonesia, in which these alternative methods have succeeded.

Social Impact Finance is the third book in the IE Business Publishing series for the Saudi Spanish Center of Islamic Economics and Finance and will be of particular interest to micro, small & medium sized businesses as well as young entrepreneurs.