SAIB BNP Paribas Asset Management Company (SAIB BNP Paribas AMC), a leading asset manager in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East, signed a distribution agreement for a selection of its mutual funds with Derayah Financial. As a consequence of this agreement, Derayah will distribute SAIB BNP Paribas AMC’s Sharia-compliant mutual funds to individual investors through its online mutual fund supermarket.

Radi Al-Haddad, CEO of SAIB BNP Paribas AMC commented “We are excited about this opportunity to add more distribution outlets to our mutual fund products, which should make our top-performing family of funds available to a wider audience of individual investors. This would also enable us to concentrate on our core area of competence, which is hiring the best managers to serve our clients and consistently beating our performance benchmarks as we have done in the past.”

On his part, Mohammed El-Kuwaiz, the Managing Director of Derayah commented “Over the past months we have been building a single distribution platform that offers Sharia-compliant mutual funds from different managers. So naturally we are enthusiastic about adding SAIB BNP Paribas AMC’ products to our platform, as from our independent analysis, they have the top performing Murabaha and Trade Finance Fund over the last 5 years. In fact recently Zawya nominated their Saudi Equity Fund as the Number 2 Fund on several parameters consistently over the last 3 years.”

SAIB BNP Paribas AMC’ products are now offered on Derayah’s platform (www.derayah.com) and will be available for lower minimum investments starting from SAR 500.

SAIB BNP Paribas Asset Management Company brings a solid track record, talent pool of professionals, and clientele base. It is a Joint Venture with Saudi Investment Bank and BNP Paribas Investment Partners, a leader in the European asset management industry, with assets of ( Euro 325 billion*). Core asset management activities comprise management of 15 mutual funds and individualized discretionary portfolios. The Company has a wide range of mutual funds covering local, regional, and international markets under different assets classes, has been a pioneer in introducing the first full fledged GCC Equity Fund in 2004 and has won the Lipper award for it’s Saudi Companies Fund for the year 2006. As of June 2009, the total assets under management invested through mutual funds and portfolios stood around SAR 5 billion.

Derayah is the only one-stop-shop for individual investors in the Middle East. Derayah offers the first independent on-line platform where individuals can invest in over 60 mutual funds from 7 different asset managers, as well as obtain transparent information, research and advice to make informed investment decisions on their own.

*as of March 31st 2009, assets under advise included.