Qardus Review - Halal Finance Products

Qardus was founded to close the funding gap for small businesses whose owners will not take interest-based loans - the platform's framing is that traditional banking forces SMEs to choose between growth and their values. It operates a two-sided marketplace: UK SMEs seeking finance on one side, high-net-worth and self-certified sophisticated investors providing Sharia-compliant financing on the other, with Qardus reporting GBP 5.1 million deployed, a 40% repeat-client rate and 4/5 measured client satisfaction as of the crawl date.

The borrower products are two tiers. Unsecured finance runs GBP 25,000 to GBP 200,000 over 6 to 36 months for working capital. Secured finance runs GBP 150,000 to GBP 500,000 for up to five years against existing business assets, with asset financing of longer duration planned. In place of interest, the SME pays a one-off pre-agreed arrangement fee plus a profit rate that is fixed in advance - Qardus markets 'fixed finance rates' and 'no hidden fees and no interest'. No rate ranges are published; an online business finance calculator provides indicative repayment estimates.

Eligibility is strict and published: UK-registered limited companies or partnerships, minimum three years of trading history (start-ups explicitly ineligible), demonstrable stable cash flows, no outstanding county court judgments, and operation in a Sharia-compliant sector - gambling, pork production and alcohol are named exclusions. The process is streamlined: an online application in minutes, an in-house review using a soft search that does not mark the credit file, a funding offer within 48 hours where approved, and funds typically within two working days of signing.

Sharia governance is the platform's differentiator. Every applicant business is screened for Sharia compliance, Sharia-compliant structures are used on both sides of the marketplace, and the whole platform operates under independent oversight from a dedicated board led by Mufti Faraz Adam of Amanah Advisors - one of the most active Sharia advisory practices in Western Islamic fintech. An official Sharia compliance certificate is downloadable from the site (the hosted certificate covers the Qardus Fixed Income Product via Amanah). What the pages do not do is name the underlying contract for the SME financing; the fee-plus-fixed-profit shape is consistent with commodity murabaha, the market-standard structure for this product type, but Qardus does not say so explicitly on the crawled pages.

The regulatory position is disclosed with unusual bluntness in Qardus's own footer: the financing agreements do not constitute designated investments under UK financial services regulation, Qardus is not authorised or regulated by the FCA, and investors have no FSCS or Financial Ombudsman rights. For borrowers this is less material - business-to-business lending to companies is generally outside the FCA perimeter anyway - but it frames the platform as a contractual, relationship-driven financier rather than a regulated institution (crawled qardus.com, 2026-08-06).