Qistal is building a Shariah investment intelligence layer for Nigerian equities, combining stock screening, financial data, portfolio monitoring and purification in one place. It started with a conversation between two founders who could not find the kind of tool they believed Muslim investors in Nigeria needed.
Buying Nigerian stocks has become remarkably easy. A retail investor can open an investment app, fund an account, search for a company on the Nigerian Exchange (NGX), and place an order within minutes.
For a Muslim investor, however, there is often one more question before the buy button: Is this stock halal? The answer is rarely as simple as checking what the company sells.
A cement manufacturer may operate in a permissible industry but carry too much interest-bearing debt. A telecoms company may earn part of its income from interest. A consumer goods company may hold significant amounts in interest-bearing instruments.
Even when a company passes compliance checks this quarter, its financial position can change when it updates its books in the following quarter. Finding out means going much deeper than the stock price.
An investor may have to download a company’s financial statements, work through dozens of pages of disclosures, identify its borrowings and interest income, find investments that may be interest-bearing, calculate the relevant Shariah ratios, and then work out whether any dividend eventually received needs to be purified.
That is a lot to do as a Muslim before buying shares, and until recently, Nigerian Muslim investors who wanted something more current than a periodically reviewed list had few locally-built tools designed specifically for that job.
Nigeria already had the NGX-Lotus Islamic Index, which identifies a basket of Shariah-compliant equities and is periodically rebalanced. What was missing was an on-demand product through which an individual investor could screen NGX stocks, inspect the numbers behind the verdict and continue monitoring compliance after investing.
That gap is where Qistal began.
Meet the founders building a Shariah investment intelligence layer for Nigerian stocks
Dhikrullah Ibraheem and Oke Taofeek Deji are the co-founders behind Qistal, a homegrown Shariah investment intelligence platform purpose-built around the Nigerian stock market.
It began with a pain point. Taofeek had been lamenting the absence of a real-time Shariah stock screener for NGX-listed companies — something that could go beyond a static list and let an investor check a stock when they actually wanted to buy it. The complaint turned into a conversation between both founders.
What would a proper Nigerian Shariah investment platform need to show? Could investors see not only whether a company passed, but also the financial figures responsible for that verdict? Could the system be updated as new company accounts were released? And after someone invested, could it continue watching the portfolio for changes in Shariah compliance?
The partnership brought together two different sides of the problem. Ibraheem leads the development of Qistal’s core screening and investment-intelligence engine: the systems that ingest company financials, interpret relevant disclosures, calculate screening ratios and turn those inputs into information investors can use.
Taofeek leads on Shariah and governance, helping ensure that the methodology, interpretation and product decisions remain grounded in the Islamic finance principles the platform is supposed to represent.
That combination became important because the challenge was as technical as it was jurisprudential.
The software could calculate a ratio perfectly and still produce the wrong answer if the wrong accounting figure had been classified as debt. Equally, having a sound Shariah methodology would not solve the problem of keeping hundreds of financial data points current across a changing stock market. Qistal had to do both.
When its precursor, Mizan, was introduced in July 2026, it gave Nigerian investors a locally built way to screen NGX stocks, inspect the financial basis for Shariah verdicts and monitor portfolios over time. Mizan later became Qistal as the founders expanded the ambition beyond screening into a broader investment-intelligence product.
The problem they were trying to solve, however, remained the same: How can Nigerian Muslims participate in the stock market without having to choose between investment information and confidence in the Shariah basis of what they own?
Showing the work behind the verdict
When an investor searches for a company on Qistal, it first evaluates what the company actually does.
Businesses whose core activities fall within prohibited categories do not proceed even if their balance sheets look acceptable. Conventional financial institutions, for example, fail the business-activity screen, while more complicated companies may require closer examination of where their revenue comes from.
Companies that pass the qualitative stage are then assessed against AAOIFI-style financial criteria. Qistal examines measures including interest-bearing debt, cash and interest-bearing securities, and non-permissible income.
But the more important part of the product is what sits beneath the verdict. Investors can see the figures used in the calculation, the reporting period they came from, the relevant thresholds, and the source financial information supporting the assessment.
That transparency is intentional, as Shariah screening should not have to operate like a black box in which an investor receives a green badge and is expected to trust whatever happened behind it.
A serious investor should be able to ask why.
Nigerian financial statements have their own complications
Building the product specifically for the Nigerian market has also exposed another challenge: financial data does not always arrive in neat categories. A figure labelled “borrowings” on the face of a balance sheet may not tell the complete story.
Commercial papers can appear deeper inside financial statement notes. Finance income may contain several components that need to be separated. Companies report similar transactions differently, and some disclosures require interpretation before they can be mapped into a Shariah screening framework. These details matter because getting the input wrong means getting the ratio wrong.
Qistal’s current stock pages connect verdicts to the underlying financial period and screening record, while its portfolio product is designed to surface changes as new filings and data alter a company’s compliance position.
The ambition is to build a layer of locally relevant Shariah investment data that can eventually serve individual investors as well as organisations that need structured compliance information.
Screening is only the beginning
There is another limitation to treating halal investing as a search problem. Once an investor eventually buys a stock, the status moves from screening to monitoring.
Suppose an investor buys shares in a company after it passes the relevant Shariah requirements, and six months later, the company releases another financial statement that substantially increases its interest-bearing borrowing; the investor may never know.
Their brokerage account will still show the same number of shares. Their portfolio may still be profitable, but nothing on a conventional investment dashboard is designed to tell them that the Shariah basis on which they originally bought the company has changed.
Instead of treating compliance as a verdict that ends at the point of purchase, users can add their holdings and continue monitoring them as company financials change. New financial statements can trigger reassessment, while holdings requiring attention can be discovered by the investor.
Then there is purification
A company that passes a Shariah screen may earn a small amount of incidental non-permissible income. For a Muslim shareholder, this creates another responsibility.
The portion of a dividend attributable to that income must be purified by giving the corresponding amount to charity. It sounds straightforward until an investor tries to calculate it; then they realise the need for an appropriate non-permissible income figure, the relevant income basis, the resulting purification percentage and the dividend they actually received.
Where purification is required, the platform identifies it alongside the screening result and helps the investor determine the amount attributable to their holding.
The goal is to remove the need for an investor to move between a stock list, an annual report, a calculator and several browser tabs just to understand one investment.
Building a new layer for Nigeria’s Muslim investors
Fintech platforms have made stocks easier to access. Market information travels faster, and more retail investors can follow company results, fund accounts, and invest without visiting a brokerage office.
However, lowering the barrier to buying an asset does not answer whether that asset is appropriate for every investor. For ethical investors, financial decisions usually carry constraints that conventional investment infrastructure is not designed to address.
Qistal seeks to bridge this gap. Beyond screening and portfolio monitoring, it is developing investment intelligence around compliant companies, market and company news, purification, zakat and an AI interface through which investors can interrogate companies and their portfolios.
Fact-check references
• NGX-Lotus Islamic Index FAQ (NGX)
• Mizan/Qistal launch context – Dhikrullah Ibraheem, July 2026
