Technology executive Kurram Agha recognized five years ago that Muslim investors have a limited number of options for ETF and mutual funds in North America—and very few cost-effective ones.
That’s why Agha launched Aghaz Invest, a robo-advisor service that delivers investments aligned with sharia, or Islamic law.
After a successful career at Microsoft, Aghaz decided he wanted to do something in business and enrolled in an M.B.A. program. After emerging, he knew that he wanted his second career to be involved in solving a real-world problem that he could easily communicate with his family and his community about.
Agha was frustrated by low-cost U.S. index funds tracking broad market indexes like the S&P 500, which list companies blind to whether they are deemed halal, or pure by Islamic law, or haram, forbidden.
“Out of approximately 500 stocks, only 192 meet halal,” he said. “There is an Islamic framework agreed upon by most Muslims that excludes companies that charge interest, sell alcohol, or are considered sin stocks for various reasons. So Muslims can only access 36% of the most popular index—but that’s still large enough for us to diversify.”
Active offerings available to investors and advisors in the Islamic space, like Saturna’s Amana funds and funds from Azzad management, were too expensive, carrying expense ratios of 100 basis points or more, and were too often offered outside of a goals-based framework, said Agha.
Agha realized that, without low-cost and easy-to-access products to diversify with, many Muslims were holding large sums of money in cash positions, or were concentrating into real estate or gold investments.
“We’ve been putting ourselves at a disadvantage by not buying and selling stocks and using modern investment strategies,” he said. “There are some in the Muslim community who have become comfortable holding non-compliant portfolios and owning non-compliant stocks. To them, we would say that we think our portfolios can do better—that they can do well by doing good.”
Inspired by socially responsible, impact, and ESG investors, he sought to create a new, automated investing methodology that could help the Islamic community. That methodology is built on an investment framework created by AAOIFI, a Middle Eastern accounting and auditing firm, and direct indexing technology offered by DriveWealth, a fintech that powers several roboadvisors and automated investing platforms.
Aghaz Invest also offers goals-based planning, allowing a user to save and dedicate portions of their portfolio to long-term goals like retirement and legacy, or short-term goals like purchasing a home or a car.