Equity crowdfunding and peer-to-peer financing, structured, screened, certified and supervised. Our deepest practice: engagements across five regions and four continents.
The problem
A crowdfunding platform looks like a single product and behaves like a portfolio of them. Project financing, invoice financing, home financing and working capital each need a different Islamic contract, and all of them have to run on one set of rails, one set of terms, one onboarding flow and one fee structure.
That is where the Shariah risk concentrates. The contract is sound in isolation and breaks when it shares infrastructure with three others, a fee charged uniformly across contracts that cannot all bear the same fee, a default process written once for arrangements that require different treatment, a disbursement sequence that suits murabahah and quietly invalidates musharakah.
Project financing
Musharakah or mudarabah participation
Invoice financing
A different contract, same onboarding rails
Home financing
Disbursement sequence that suits murabahah
Working capital
One fee structure across all four
What we do
The governance framework covering the platform's model, its campaign approval process and its ongoing obligations.
Structuring each financing line on the contract it actually needs, and resolving the conflicts where they share infrastructure.
Qualitative and quantitative screening of issuers before they go live, against the applicable regulator's assessment framework.
Investor agreements, issuer agreements, terms of service, disclosures, consent screens and the sequence in which the platform performs the contract.
Issued under a reference investors and regulators can verify independently.
Campaign-level review as the platform scales, and annual Shariah audit.
Why ADL
Our team pairs certified Muftis holding AAOIFI qualifications with people who understand code, systems and product architecture. We hold Malaysia Digital Status from the Malaysian Digital Economy Corporation, a technology credential, held by a Shariah advisory firm. Where there is an app, we go into it. Where there is a core banking system, we review the configuration.
Registered Shariah Adviser with the Securities Commission Malaysia and with Labuan Financial Services Authority.
We work primarily against AAOIFI standards and reconcile with the applicable local regime. An opinion grounded in AAOIFI travels across borders.
Beyond applying Islamic finance standards, our team has been commissioned by a standard-setting body: research towards a governance standard, participation in the drafting of a preliminary standard, and a series of training assignments.
Auditing against another adviser's pronouncement is ordinary work for us, as is being audited by another firm. Independence is the point of the exercise.
We work in jurisdictions with mature Islamic finance regulation and in markets with none at all, where the structure has to satisfy Shariah while operating entirely within a conventional rulebook.
Best Shariah Advisory in Islamic Asset Management, presented in Jeddah in February 2026.
Members of our team hold Shariah board and committee seats across the institutions we serve, so our advisory work is informed by governance experience, not only by external review.
How we hold ourselves
Our measure of a good year is not only revenue. It is whether we helped one more business get to halal. That is why we will take a call from a founder at ideation stage, and why our pricing bends to what a client can actually carry. We would rather a small platform get its structure right at the start than be priced out and get it wrong at scale.
A business built on an Islamic label still has to be a good business. Sound fundamentals, capable people, honest disclosure, and a high standard of compliance with local regulation, because that is what protects the customer and the investor. Shariah compliance sits on top of that foundation. It is not a substitute for it, and we will say so if we see it being treated as one.
The Lifecycle
Compliance is a state you maintain rather than a certificate you obtain, and the audit cycle is how you maintain it.
We understand the platform and its financing lines before we quote.
Scope, timeline and fee agreed, agreement signed.
The deep stage: each financing line, the shared rails, the layered agreements, and the sequence the platform performs the contract in.
Findings returned and worked through with your product, legal and engineering teams; the structure is adjusted.
Issued by a certified Mufti.
Issued under a reference any counterparty can verify independently.
For a platform the cycle runs for as long as campaigns are live: the framework is re-tested every year, and campaign-level review continues as volume grows.
We commit to two to four weeks for a first pronouncement. In practice it often runs longer, and in our experience the reason is the round trip rather than the review. We raise amendments, and your product and engineering teams need time to work through them. We would rather set that expectation now than surprise you in week three.
Engagements are scoped and priced individually. We have worked with platforms at licensing stage and with operators running live campaign volume across several jurisdictions. One size does not fit all. Tell us what you are building and we will tell you what it takes.
Evidence
Blockchain crowdfunding platform (North America)We reviewed the smart contract algorithms written into the blockchain, the end-to-end process flow, the front end, and the underlying agreements and terms and conditions. Certified. Now raising Shariah-compliant funds on-chain, with a secondary market for the tokens in prospect.
Peer-to-peer platform (Southeast Asia)Musharakah, mudarabah and murabahah structured across four financing lines on one platform: project financing, invoice financing, home financing and affordable housing. Operating for years, financing live.
Equity crowdfunding platform (Southeast Asia)End-to-end qualitative and quantitative screening against the securities regulator's assessment framework. The platform has been running equity crowdfunding for some years since.
We have also advised peer-to-peer platforms in Europe, including structures built on salam and istisna, and crowdfunding platforms in South Asia financing small businesses, startups and agriculture.
Questions
Yes, substantially. Equity crowdfunding is an ownership question, screening the issuer, structuring the participation, defining investor rights. P2P is a financing question, the contract, the disbursement sequence, the fee basis and the treatment of default. Platforms running both need both, and the interaction between them is where findings arise.
No, and this is common. We review the live product, identify what needs to change, and sequence the remediation so the platform keeps operating. Income earned from a non-compliant period is purified rather than ignored.
Either. Most platforms engage us for the framework and the certification, then for campaign-level screening as volume grows.
Before engineering commits to a build. A Shariah issue found at design stage costs a change of structure. The same issue found after launch can cost a rebuild, a re-papering of investor and issuer contracts, and the purification of income already earned.
A pronouncement is the scholarly ruling, the reasoned opinion that a product, as described, complies. A certification is the instrument that evidences it, carrying a reference your counterparties can check. The pronouncement is the judgment; the certificate is the proof.
A charge levied to compensate the financier for delay is generally not treated as permissible income. The common treatment is a charge channelled to charity rather than recognised as revenue, disclosed to the customer, with the accounting configured so it never enters the income statement. The detail depends on the contract used and the jurisdiction.
Our certification confirms Shariah compliance. It is not an assessment of whether a business is viable, whether its financials are sound, or whether the people running it can execute. Look at both questions, and do your own due diligence on the second. Every ADL certificate carries a reference you can check independently.
Book a consultation, whether you are applying for a licence or already running live campaigns. We will tell you at the first meeting whether the structure holds.