This study aims to evaluate and compare the financial performance of the Jordanian
Islamic and conventional banks using the five financial indicators of the "CAMEL"
method represented by: Capital Adequacy index, Asset Quality index, Management
Qua
lity index, Profitability index, and the Liquidity index. This comparison will detect
which of the two banks Islamic or Conventional achieves a better performance than the
other. In order to study the reflection of financial performance on customers at the level of
public trust, and to achieve these purposes, we select a total of thirteen Jordanian
Conventional banks and two Islamic banks as a sample for this study during the period of
(2006-2012). We employ a test “t-test” to study the significance of the differences between
the averages of financial ratios and the use of multiple linear regression analysis to show
the impact of financial performance indicators individually and collectively on the level of
public trust. The result of this study clearly shows that Conventional banking achieves a
better financial performance than Islamic banking, although the level of public trust of
customers in Islamic banking stems mainly from its achieved financial performance,
contrary to what has been obtained during this study for Conventional banking.