Frequently Asked Questions

A CIFE™ membership gives you immediate access to all training videos for 4 months and certification at no extra cost. You also get to participate in the discussion forum, create and view member profiles, search the Q&A database, ask and answer questions on the Fiqh or Fiction forum, earn cash as an Affiliate, listen to podcasts, and attend live webinars.

No. To claim expertise you need to work at a bank and get hands-on training with other experts. Ethica Institute will put you ahead of other people without training, but it is no substitute for  real-world experience.

Login, go to “My Account,” and select “Renew Membership.”

Free Members: Go to “My Account” and select “Upgrade Membership.”

Go to the homepage, click on “Become An Affiliate” and follow the instructions.

You get 10% in cash of whatever your referee spends, whether you have referred a single individual or an entire bank for a Corporate License. The money is paid to your PayPal account every month. Affiliates can make up to $10,000 per year and Super Affiliates can make an unlimited amount per year.

A Super Affiliate is somebody we have recognized as a high performer. We place no limits on the amount of cash a Super Affiliate may earn each year.

No. Your email, phone number, address, and membership details remain hidden.

Whether you are hiring or headhunting, networking or partnering, it’s good to let others know who you are, and good to see who else is out there. This is the first dedicated Islamic finance online networking tool so take advantage of it.

During sign-up, select "Corporate License."

We grant 7 day free trials to a single computer for clients considering a Corporate License. All other prospective clients may cancel within 30 days and be returned all their money except for first month charges.

If you cancel within 30 days of signing up, you only get charged for the first month. That means your entire subscription gets refunded except the first month’s charges. Refunds cannot be issued after your initial 30 day trial and we don’t prorate for partial months.

We charge you for the entire Membership period upfront. If you cancel, you’ll be billed for the current month, but you won’t be billed again.

We accept Visa and Mastercard and take payments online only.

We have done our best to ensure that every answer complies with the standard-setting body Accounting and Auditing Organization of Islamic Financial Institution’s (AAOIFI) latest Shariah Standards. Even so, every question is understood in a particular context, and this context varies according to the particulars of a given transaction. The questions and answers in this database are intended to facilitate learning, not to substitute expert legal opinion. Islamic finance practitioners should always seek the opinion of a reliable Shariah scholar who possesses deep practical knowledge of both Islamic Law and banking.

Two reasons:
1) To limit the number of questions; after all, there’s thousands of you, and only a few of us; and
2) To be able to finance our “Train-A-Scholar” Fund in which a portion of the revenues go to educating promising scholars in Islamic finance.

About 17 to 23 minutes.

No. We conduct all training over the Internet.

The convenience, reliability and efficiency of online delivery is unsurpassed.

Absolutely. We’re here for you. Email contact@ethicainstitute.com and somebody will respond to you as soon as possible.

You may use Ethica’s training modules to train others only if you have a licensing agreement with us beforehand. If not, you would be subject to international copyright infringement laws. Since we are able to detect back-end activity and streaming frequency, we know when existing memberships get abused. For instance, if a bank buys 5 memberships and uses it to train 30 employees. Email us at contact@ethicainstitute.com to get started with your licensing agreement.

You take a 90 minute online exam with 112 multiple choice questions (passing mark is 60%) covering the "Understanding Islamic Finance" (18) PLUS the "Islamic Financial Innovation" (4) modules. We also provide organizations the ability to conduct close-door exams at their respective locations.

Once you are ready, login to our website and click on 'My Account.' Click on 'Take CIFE™ Exam' button and follow the instructions.

We aim to not only be Shariah-compliant, but we also aim to follow AAOIFI (Accounting and Auditing Organization of Islamic Financial Institutions) and IFSB (Islamic Financial Services Board), the two most well recognized international standard-setting bodies in the Islamic finance industry.

The CIFE™ is the first Islamic finance certificate available online that upholds AAOIFI’s latest Shariah Standards. The certificate requires you to pass a moderately challenging test on various areas of Islamic finance. Passing such a test, and obtaining the certificate, gives employers and clients that much more confidence in your knowledge of Islamic finance.

Leading institutions now use e-learning for high stakes testing, including Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford. And increasingly banks and corporates now rely on e-learning to certify their bankers, spawning the KPO, or Knowledge Process Outsourcing industry, one of the fastest growing sectors in the bank training market. The key to preventing cheating, and the one we use at Ethica Institute with our CIFE™ is to ensure that the content is sufficiently difficult, even for a specialist. So that someone who has not studied for the certification exam using our AAOIFI- based content would find it difficult to pass. Even our Shariah Auditor had to prepare well to pass the exam. On a more philosophical level, we find that good cheaters make for embarrassed bankers. We provide our Corporate License users the opportunity to test at their institution where there is a need for high-stakes, synchronous testing under controlled conditions.

If you do not pass the first time, you pay $195 each time you retake the exam.

The test is based on Islamic finance questions taken from modules covered under the "Understanding Islamic Finance" (18 modules) AND the "Islamic Financial Innovation" (4 modules) track.

We recommend a broadband connection. However, training modules are streamable on dial-up connections as well. For slower connections, allow 1 to 3 minutes to stream modules.

We recommend that you install the latest version of Adobe Flash at http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

We recommend that you use a 512 Kbps or faster broadband connection and that you close all Internet-based applications (i.e. Instant Messenger, Skype, Google, etc.) during the webinar.

In our ongoing effort to promote industry-wide standards, we rely on the opinions of scholars who are knowledgeable in the Accounting and Auditing Organization of Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI) Shariah Standards.

1. You Know What You’re Getting: It’s difficult to monitor what the trainer is teaching in a face-to-face or in-house environment. At Ethica Institute, we hold ourselves to well-known standard that anyone is able to check.

2. Anytime, Anywhere: Online training allows users to learn on their own time at their own pace, not during the most productive hours of the day.

3. Cost-Effective: Using expensive consultants and pulling busy staff away from work to train junior staff is the old way of doing things. Online training saves you hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Poverty is a symptom of the root problem, and we believe one root problem is compounded interest. We hope to give people the tools to: 1) remove interest; and 2) implement alternatives. Islamic finance is still in its infancy and much progress still needs to be made but the proven principles of equity-based and asset and service-backed finance remain equally compelling.

We aim to provide a complete community experience in which multiple complementary learning channels, not to mention certification, are not obtainable by mere copying. Even so, we handle copyright infringement by incorporating a sophisticated back-end (data rights management) infrastructure that brings world class security to our website for easy fraud detection. Moreover, our members are everywhere, and when other trainers’ content begins to look suspiciously like ours, we use our team of legal advisors to pursue offenders to the full extent of international law.