How to Add Shariah Compliance to Your Investing App

The market for halal investing is growing fast, and any investing app that serves Muslim users, or wants to, eventually faces the same question: how do we tell users whether a stock is Shariah-compliant, reliably and at scale? You could build the screening engine, financial-data pipeline, and scholar workflow yourself, or you could add a compliance layer through an API in an afternoon. This guide walks through the size of the opportunity, where Shariah compliance fits in an investing app, and how to add it without reinventing Islamic finance.

Table of Contents

• How big is the opportunity?
• Why add Shariah compliance?
• Build vs buy
• Where compliance fits in your app
• How to add it with the Akinda API
• Getting the governance right

How big is the opportunity?

Shariah compliance isn't a niche checkbox, it's access to one of the fastest-growing segments in finance. Global Islamic finance assets stand at roughly $5.1 trillion in 2026 and are projected to reach about $8.46 trillion by 2031, a compound annual growth rate near 10.7%, according to Mordor Intelligence. The Islamic fintech slice is growing faster still: Grand View Research puts it around $250 billion in 2026, heading toward $619 billion by 2033 at roughly 13.8% a year.

Behind those numbers is a large, young, digital-first audience. The global Muslim population is about 2 billion today and projected to reach 2.8 billion by 2050, and rising incomes across Organisation of Islamic Cooperation countries have lifted Muslim consumer spending into the trillions. For much of this audience, Shariah compliance is not a premium feature, it's a baseline expectation before they'll open an account.

The demand also reaches beyond Muslim users. A Morningstar survey found that 61% of sustainable-fund investors in Europe and North America see Islamic funds as inherently ESG-aligned, and Islamic banking penetration has grown 18% in non-Muslim markets on the strength of that ethical appeal. Adding a compliance layer can therefore widen your reach on two fronts at once, faith-based and values-based investors.

Why add Shariah compliance?

For a large, underserved population of Muslim investors, Shariah compliance is the deciding factor in whether they can use your product at all. Adding it opens the fast-growing segment above, improves retention among values-driven users, and aligns naturally with the ethical and ESG screens many non-Muslim users already look for. There's also a cross-sell dividend: once users trust that a product respects their values, they tend to adopt adjacent offerings, savings, sukuk, takaful, at higher rates than conventional users convert across products. In markets across the Gulf, South and Southeast Asia, and the CIS region, compliance is simply table stakes for a financial product.

Build vs buy

Building Shariah screening in-house is deceptively hard. You'd need licensed financial data, a screening engine encoding the business and financial rules, a purification model, and, critically, a qualified scholar to sign off on the methodology and edge cases. That last requirement is the real bottleneck. The Islamic International Rating Agency estimates there are fewer than 1,200 qualified Sharia board members worldwide serving over 2,000 institutions, and an INCEIF study found that 42% of Islamic banks in Africa operate without a certified Sharia compliance officer. Professionals with dual expertise in Islamic jurisprudence and financial engineering are rare and expensive to hire.

Maintaining all of that as company financials shift each quarter is an ongoing cost, not a one-off build. An API turns the whole stack into a few endpoints. For most teams, buying a maintained, scholar-governed data layer is far cheaper and safer than owning it, and it lets your engineers focus on the product rather than on Islamic-finance infrastructure. You can see what the screening looks like from the user's side on Akinda's live screener.

Where compliance fits in your app

Screening is a building block you can surface in several places, depending on your product. The most common integrations, roughly in order of effort:

• A halal badge on every ticker and company page, so users see compliance status at a glance. This is the lowest-effort, highest-visibility integration, one call to the compliance endpoint per symbol.
• A pre-trade compliance gate that checks a stock before an order executes and warns or blocks non-compliant buys. This is where screening becomes a real guardrail rather than just information.
• Portfolio monitoring that re-screens holdings each quarter and alerts users when a position drifts out of compliance after an earnings season changes a company's ratios.
• Purification tooling that tells users how much of their dividend income to cleanse, using the purification data from the full report, turning compliance into an actionable number.
• Onboarding filters that let users opt into a halal-only universe from the start, so every screen they see is already compliant.

How to add it with the Akinda API

Integration follows the same path as any REST API. The Akinda Halal API exposes three endpoints, a fast compliance verdict, a basic report, and a full report with all ratios and purification data, documented in the developer docs.

1. Generate an API key from the dashboard and start on the free tier to prototype without commitment.
2. Call the compliance endpoint with a ticker and parse the JSON verdict.
3. Surface the result in your UI as a badge, a gate decision, or a full report view.
4. Schedule quarterly re-screening so verdicts stay current, and cache results between runs to control request volume.
5. Review the pricing page and move to a business plan when you go to production.

Because the responses are structured JSON, the same endpoints also drop into AI-agent and MCP workflows, letting a model screen tickers mid-conversation. For the commercial and partnership picture, the Akinda for Business page covers how the halal data layer supports fintechs and Islamic banks.

Getting the governance right

Automated screening is powerful, but it isn't a fatwa, and your users deserve to know that. The lack of standardised Shariah interpretation across jurisdictions is a real industry challenge, which is exactly why transparency matters. Choose an API whose screening methodology is published in full, so your own compliance team and Shariah board can audit the rules, and whose verdicts are overseen by a qualified scholar. The Akinda API's methodology is a documented three-phase screen reviewed by Dr. Muhammad Nazir Khan, who holds a PhD in Islamic Economics and Finance and an AAOIFI Shari'ah Auditing Certification.

In practice, good governance means three things: present verdicts as data-driven screening rather than religious rulings, keep a qualified scholar in the loop for edge cases like mergers or partial-period reporting, and make clear to users that final religious authority rests with scholars. Done well, this builds exactly the trust that drives the retention and cross-sell economics described above.

Frequently asked questions

How big is the halal investing market?

Large and growing quickly. Global Islamic finance assets are around $5.1 trillion in 2026 and projected to reach roughly $8.46 trillion by 2031, while the Islamic fintech segment is expanding at nearly 14% a year toward $619 billion by 2033. With about 2 billion Muslims worldwide and rising demand from ethically-minded non-Muslim investors, the addressable market for compliant products is substantial.

Should I build or buy Shariah screening?

For almost all teams, buy. Building in-house means licensing financial data, encoding and maintaining the screening rules, modelling purification, and retaining a scholar to govern it, then keeping all of that current every quarter. With fewer than 1,200 qualified Sharia board members globally, the talent alone is a serious constraint. An API delivers the same capability through a few endpoints at a fraction of the cost and risk.

Do non-Muslims use Shariah-compliant products?

Increasingly, yes. Because Shariah screening overlaps heavily with ethical and ESG exclusions, values-driven non-Muslim investors are a meaningful part of the audience. Surveys show a majority of sustainable-fund investors in Europe and North America already view Islamic funds as ESG-aligned, and Islamic banking has grown notably in non-Muslim markets.

How do I keep compliance verdicts up to date?

Re-screen on a schedule, quarterly is sensible, since a company's debt, cash, and revenue mix can move it in or out of compliance after each earnings season. With an API, you re-call the endpoint for each holding and update your cached verdicts, then alert users whose positions have changed status.

Does adding screening make my app a religious authority?

No, and you shouldn't present it that way. Screening provides automated, data-driven signals, not religious rulings. Best practice is to show the verdict and the reasoning, pair it with a qualified scholar for edge cases, and tell users that final religious authority rests with scholars, not the algorithm.

Sources

AAOIFI Shari'ah Standard No. 21: Financial Paper (Shares and Bonds) – the standard the Akinda API's screening methodology is built around.

Akinda API screening methodology – the full three-phase screen, ratio formulas, and purification rule, published for integrators to audit.

Akinda API Shariah advisor – the scholar governance behind the API's halal verdicts.

Mordor Intelligence – Global Islamic Finance Market (2026) – Islamic finance market size and growth projections.

Grand View Research – Islamic Fintech Market Report – Islamic fintech market size and CAGR.

Disclaimer

This article is about a software product and is for general information only. It is not financial or religious advice. Automated Shariah screening produces data-driven signals, not a fatwa; integrators should pair it with their own Shariah governance and consult qualified scholars. API features, endpoints, coverage, and pricing change over time, so verify current details on b2b.akinda.io before building.