Fintechs Partner on Shariah Gold Investing
UK-based Tabadulat has partnered with Minted Connect to offer Shariah-compliant, gold-backed investments. The service will be made available to consumers through various embedded finance platforms. The partnership combines Tabadulat's financial technology with Minted Connect's access to physical gold.
This partnership is anchored in the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) and operates under the supervision of its Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA), ensuring a regulated environment for institutional investors. Tabadulat, founded in 2024, acts as the licensed Islamic brokerage, providing the necessary compliance, trade execution, and segregated custody for the gold-backed Exchange Traded Commodities (ETCs). Minted Connect, authorized in the Dubai Multi Commodities Centre (DMCC), provides the underlying physical gold and digital asset infrastructure. The collaboration is facilitated through API and system integrations to ensure secure and scalable trading and settlement workflows, a crucial element for the embedded finance platforms that will distribute the product. This "Trading-as-a-Service" model allows other fintechs and financial institutions to incorporate Shariah-compliant investment features more rapidly. The collaboration taps into a significant market trend, with gold prices seeing a substantial 64% increase in 2025, the largest annual gain since 1979. For Minted Connect, which serves over three million users globally, this partnership allows for the diversification of its own institutional treasury assets into compliant, physically-backed instruments. The service leverages tokenization, where ownership of physical gold is represented by digital tokens on a blockchain. This process enhances transparency and security through an immutable ledger of transactions, which helps in reducing the risk of fraud. For institutional clients, this structure offers a regulated and efficient way to gain exposure to gold while adhering to the principles of Islamic finance, which prohibit interest (riba), excessive uncertainty (gharar), and speculation (maysir). Leading the companies are Samy Mohamad, co-founder of Tabadulat, and Engin Bütün, co-founder and CEO of Minted Connect. Mohamad, formerly of Morgan Stanley, founded Tabadulat to address the lack of unified, global Shariah-compliant investment platforms for Muslim investors. Bütün emphasizes that this is a strategic partnership aimed at building a robust ecosystem for ethically aligned financial products. This initiative is part of a broader trend in the UAE, which is positioning itself as a hub for digital assets and fintech. Regulatory bodies like the ADGM's FSRA are creating frameworks that support the growth of such innovative financial products. The partnership also reflects a larger movement in fintech towards collaboration, where specialized firms join forces to bring comprehensive and compliant solutions to market more efficiently. The partnership also involves another fintech, Fasset, with whom Tabadulat has signed an MOU to develop further Shariah-compliant tokenized assets. This indicates a strategic direction to expand beyond gold into other real-world assets, leveraging blockchain technology to increase accessibility and transparency for investors globally. For the embedded finance platforms that will eventually offer this service to consumers, robust digital identity verification and AML/KYC processes are critical. The regulatory framework in the UAE, including the national digital identity platform UAE Pass, provides a strong foundation for secure and compliant customer onboarding in the digital realm.
