Financial Performance of Islamic Bank in Malaysia: Do Bank-Specific Factors Matter?

Healthy, resilient and sustainable profitability is vital in maintaining the stability of the banking system. Research on a bank’s financial performance is an important tool towards improving performance, evaluating bank operations and determining management plans for the bank’s survival in competitive markets. Therefore, this study was conducted to fill a demanding gap in the literature by providing new and the latest empirical evidence on the determinants of the financial performance of Islamic banking institutions in Malaysia. The objective of this paper is to examine the impact of bank-specific factors on Islamic banks’ financial performance. The performance of Islamic banks is measured based on return on average assets (ROAA). An Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) panel data analysis on EViews 12 was used to analyse annual data from 16 Islamic banks in Malaysia for the period of 2012 to 2021. The results revealed that only bank size from bank-specific factors has a significant positive impact in determining banks’ financial performance. Therefore, this research can be a hint at how banks should plan and measure the direction of their operations and assets management in order to sustain their performance.