by Nur Ismoilov, founder of Akinda
The first time I tried to figure out whether a stock was halal, I had four browser tabs open, a spreadsheet half filled in, and no real confidence in the answer I came up with.
I was looking at a company that seemed fine on the surface. It made software. No alcohol, no gambling, nothing obviously off-limits. Then I opened the balance sheet and found a pile of interest-bearing debt and a chunk of cash parked in interest-earning deposits. Was that too much? Compared to what? Market cap or total assets? Which scholars said what? An hour later I had more questions than when I started.
That hour is basically why Akinda exists. And building it has taught me more about running a startup than any book I’ve read, mostly because serving a small, specific group of people forces you to get the details right.
So what does “Sharia-compliant” actually mean for a stock?
If you’ve read Young Upstarts’ piece on what Sharia law means for Islamic businesses, you already know the core ideas: no riba (interest), no maysir (gambling), and avoiding excessive gharar (uncertainty). Investing in public companies adds a practical problem. Almost no listed company is perfectly clean. Most have some debt, some cash in the bank earning interest, and maybe a small revenue stream from something questionable.
So scholars and standard-setting bodies like AAOIFI built a screening approach that works in two layers.
- The business itself. What does the company mainly do? Conventional banking, alcohol, gambling, pork, tobacco, adult entertainment and similar industries are out, full stop.
- The financial ratios. If the core business is fine, you look at the numbers. The commonly used limits are roughly:
- Interest-bearing debt below about 30% of the company’s market value
- Interest-bearing cash and securities below about 30%
- Income from non-permissible sources below about 5% of total revenue
The exact thresholds and the denominator (market cap versus total assets) vary between methodologies, which is part of what makes this confusing for ordinary investors.
- Purification. If a company passes but still earns a small slice of income from impermissible sources, the investor gives away that proportion of their dividends or gains to charity. It’s a small step that a lot of people don’t know about.
None of this is static. A company can pass the screen this quarter and fail it next quarter because it took on a new loan or its share price dropped. That one detail ended up shaping almost everything we built.
Why we built Akinda
There are close to two billion Muslims in the world, and a growing number of them want to invest. Many of the people I talked to early on had the same story. They wanted to put money into the market, felt unsure whether it was allowed, and either did nothing or invested and quietly worried about it.
The tools that existed mostly fell into two camps. Some gave a simple “halal” or “not halal” label with no explanation. Others were built for institutions and assumed you already knew what a debt-to-market-cap ratio was. Very little sat in between.
So we started Akinda with a simple goal: help everyday investors check a stock through a Sharia lens and actually understand why it passes or fails. From there it grew into the things people kept asking for:
- A stock and ETF screener that shows the business activity check and each financial ratio, not just a verdict
- Portfolio monitoring, so you get told when something you own drifts out of compliance
- Purification and zakat calculators, because knowing the rule doesn’t help much if the math is a headache
- Plain-language research and learning material for people who are new to all of this
The goal was never to replace scholars. It was to take the frameworks they’ve already agreed on and make them usable on a Tuesday evening when you’re deciding whether to buy a stock.
What it taught me about building a niche fintech
1. Trust is the product.
In most fintech, people trust you with their money. In our niche, they also trust you with something that matters to them on a personal and religious level. If we get a screen wrong, it isn’t just a bad data point. It’s someone who believed they were doing the right thing.
That changed how we work. We show the methodology, the ratios and the source numbers wherever we can. When people disagree with a result, they can see exactly why we reached it. Being open about the “why” turned out to build more trust than any marketing line could.
2. A small audience is not a small problem.
People sometimes call this a niche market, and it is. But the moment you go deep, you find a long list of real problems nobody has solved properly: compliance that changes every quarter, ETFs holding hundreds of companies, purification math, zakat on investments. A niche lets you go deep instead of wide, and depth is where you become hard to replace.
3. Your users will teach you the edge cases.
I thought I understood Sharia screening before we launched. Our users quickly showed me how much I didn’t. Someone asks how to purify gains on a stock they sold mid-year. Someone else follows a different scholar’s thresholds. Each question became a feature or a clearer explanation. In a niche, your community isn’t just your customer base. It’s your research team.
4. Compliance is a moving target, so build for monitoring.
Our first version answered one question: is this stock halal today? We learned fast that the better question is: is it still halal? Share prices move, companies borrow, revenue mixes shift. That pushed us from a one-time lookup tool toward ongoing portfolio monitoring, and it’s now one of the things people value most.
5. Education is part of the product, not a side project.
A lot of our users are first-time investors. A screener alone doesn’t help someone who has never opened a brokerage account. Writing explainers, running webinars and answering questions in plain language felt like a distraction at first. Now I see it as the thing that turns a curious visitor into someone who invests with confidence.
6. Values can be a design constraint, and that’s a good thing
Working inside a set of ethical rules forces clarity. You can’t hand-wave, because every recommendation has to hold up to a framework that’s older than any startup. I think more founders could benefit from that kind of constraint, whatever their niche.
Final thoughts
If you’re building for a specific community, my advice is simple: go deeper than feels necessary. Learn the rules your users live by, show your work, and treat their questions as your roadmap. You’ll build something narrower than a typical startup, but also something people actually rely on.
And if you’re a Muslim investor still sitting on the sidelines because you weren’t sure where to start, you’re not alone. The frameworks exist. The tools are getting better. It’s a lot less overwhelming than that afternoon with four tabs and a half-finished spreadsheet.
Nur Ismoilov is the founder of Akinda, a halal investing platform that helps people screen stocks and ETFs for Sharia compliance, monitor their portfolios and calculate purification and zakat.
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