Islamic open finance: the same APIs, different contracts underneath

Open finance is usually described in terms of plumbing: a customer gives consent, a licensed provider calls an API, and data or an instruction flows between institutions. The Central Bank of the UAE's Open Finance Regulation, for example, defines two services, data sharing and service initiation, and makes both subject to the user's express consent, authentication and secure communication. None of that changes when the product is Islamic.

What changes is what the data means. A conventional loan can be summarised as a balance, a rate and a schedule. A murabaha financing is a sale: the bank bought an asset, owned it, and sold it at a disclosed cost plus an agreed profit, so the record has an asset, a sale price that does not grow, and a payment schedule. An ijarah has a lessor that still owns the asset. An investment account is not a deposit at all: the holder shares in the profit of a pool and can bear its losses. A takaful policy touches a participants' fund and an operator's fund.

If a data standard flattens all of this into "loan" and "deposit", two things go wrong. Customers are shown promises their contracts do not make, such as a guaranteed return on an investment account. And the evidence that Shariah boards and auditors rely on, such as proof that ownership came before sale, is lost at the interface.

This series takes one contract or process each week and asks three questions: what the contract requires, what the regulator or standard setter says, and what the data and the API should record. The answer is rarely a new rail. It is usually a few extra fields, an honest label and steps in the right order.

Sources: Central Bank of the UAE Rulebook, Open Finance Regulation, IFSB-23 Revised Capital Adequacy Standard (Banking Segment), 2021: Definitions

Audio: listen to this week's episode, a short conversation on the same topic.

This week's business calendar: October 5 – October 11, 2026

Generated automatically from the the IslamicOpenFinance calendar: business days, holidays and the T+1 settlement date for each day of the week.

Week at a glance

• Business days, Saudi Arabia (weekend: Friday and Saturday): 5
• Business days, United Arab Emirates (weekend: Saturday and Sunday): 5
• Business days, Bahrain (weekend: Friday and Saturday): 5
• Business days, Qatar (weekend: Friday and Saturday): 5
• Business days, Kuwait (weekend: Friday and Saturday): 5
• Business days, Oman (weekend: Friday and Saturday): 5
• Business days, Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur) (weekend: Saturday and Sunday): 5
• Business days, Indonesia (weekend: Saturday and Sunday): 5
• Business days, Pakistan (weekend: Saturday and Sunday): 5
• Business days, United Kingdom (England and Wales) (weekend: Saturday and Sunday): 5
• No month end this week.

Day by day

The same dates are available from the calendar API, per market.