Mohsin and Ibrahim: The Islamic Finance Gurus
Tell us about Islamic Finance Guru
IFG is a place where Muslims come and compare sharia-compliant investments. We create loads of helpful content that people love and gets them on to the website. Then they really buy into the brand and love the objective comparison that we provide. It’s a much-needed marketplace too – Muslims can’t just invest in mainstream financial products like everybody else. They need specific guidance from people they can trust. With IFG they get everything under one roof.
Tell us about yourself.
I’m Mohsin, one of the co-founders of IslamicFinanceGuru. I graduated from Oxford in 2012, went into teaching but left pretty quickly and then went into corporate law and qualified as a solicitor. In 2019, IslamicFinanceGuru (“IFG”) was starting to take off and my co-founder, Ibrahim, and I packed it all in to go full-time on it in late 2019/early 2020. Little did we know what was around the corner with the pandemic!
We actually set it up as a blog back in 2015 writing to ourselves as an audience. These days we get 100,000 unique monthly visitors – it’s been quite the journey! My co-founder (Ibrahim) and I were both previously corporate lawyers and we did IFG as a labour of love for many years. Like anything, just the consistency of working away at it for a few years led to decent traffic and more inbound emails than we could handle. We knew we had reached a fork in the road and we either had to go full-time on it to do it justice, or forget about it altogether.
We’ve both always had an entrepreneurial streak and it was inevitable that we’d do something in business together one day. We didn’t necessarily think of IFG as being that thing but we soon realised that it had all the ingredients of a potentially amazing business – a huge global market, a warm audience that we’d been building for a few years, and addressing a huge pain point for our users.
We’ve been blessed with really strong growth over 2020 and we’re now approaching a team of 10.
You are focussed on the UK right now - do you think that your model will transfer internationally?
100%. Like many businesses nowadays, we’re web-first and we get global traffic without asking for it. So we know the demand is there and we know we can serve it. It’s just a case of picking the right things to concentrate on to keep our growth going strong. Like anything we do, we want to do the international focus really well – that means choosing one place to focus on and it likely means either me or Ibrahim just spending time in that country and really understanding the lay of the land. Every country is different and we need to make sure our content reflects the cultural nuances.
So yes, international will come, and to an extent is already there.
How have you used technology to create value?
Technology is the heart of the business. As founders, we’ve had to do an incredible amount of learning to even get on the same page as engineers when talking to them and hiring them. Everything you seen on the website is obviously tech-based but I think the biggest tech projects are our investment comparison overhaul (which, at the time of writing, is underway but not live for users) and the build-out of our platform on our venture capital-investing brand, IFG.VC.
As we grow our team out, the volume and the significance of our tech will only increase.
How has the islamic finance sector changed since you started?
When we first started, Islamic Finance was – and is – a corporate term. It belonged to big banks and billion dollar deals using clever Islamic structures. We didn’t like that – ordinary Muslims were being left behind. What’s happened since then is that FinTech generally has grown, and so has Islamic FinTech. There a number of companies now looking to serve ordinary Muslims. So there’s definitely more choice now (and more for us compare) – and I think we are at the crest of a wave. We’re seeing mainstream providers also waking up to the tremendous opportunity here and realising that catering for the Muslim market is in their interests.
Is FinTech actually different? We've always been consumers and developers of technology in financial services.
For me, FinTech is much more about consumer-facing and consumer-enabling technology. Just think about big problems we’ve solved through the rise of FinTech in recent years. Off the top of my head, I can now very easily spend money online in USD without worrying about bank charges thanks to Starling Bank, I can verify my identity with pretty much anyone thanks to digital identity startups like Onfido, and I can send money anywhere in the world at great rates with TransferWise. We’ve made incredible progress – it’s easy to forget.
Will Brexit affect FinTech Investment - do you see Singapore-on-Thames or more of a provincial backwater for London's future.
I’m quite excited. London will always be attractive in my view. If the Government can be bold with policies and really invest in the future, investment will pour in. Early signs are encouraging. Just today I was reading that the UK was launching a “high risk” science agency looking for ground-breaking discoveries (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56117560). That’s exactly what we need.
What are your favourite FinTech innovations? The ones that enable me in my life – mentioned above!