Abstract
Sharia-compliant stock investing requires rigorous, continuous screening of public companies to ensure compliance with Islamic financial principles. According to frameworks established by regulators like the Indonesian OJK and DSN-MUI, screening checks three main parameters: business activities, debt levels relative to assets, and non-halal income ratios. Building an automated system that handles this screening on dynamic stock exchange data presents significant data ingestion, processing, and caching challenges. This technical report details the software architecture of Hissa, a Sharia-compliant stock screening engine. We discuss the technical rules, financial API ingestion strategies, and real-time watchlist calculations designed for Muslim retail investors.
1. Introduction to Sharia Screening Rules
In Islamic finance, investing in public equities is permissible only if the target company operates in compliance with Sharia guidelines. Screening frameworks (such as those from DSN-MUI in Indonesia, AAOIFI, or Dow Jones Islamic Index) look at three primary gates:
1. Business Activity Screen: The core business must not involve interest-based financial services (traditional banking, conventional insurance), non-halal food/beverages, gambling, or adult entertainment.
2. Financial Ratio - Debt Screen: Total interest-bearing debt relative to total assets must remain below a set threshold (typically 45% in Indonesia).
3. Financial Ratio - Income Screen: Non-halal revenue (such as interest earned on cash reserves) relative to total revenue must not exceed a purification limit (typically 10% or 5%).
2. The Hissa Screening Engine Architecture
To automate this screening process on the Indonesian Stock Exchange (IDX), we built Hissa. The platform utilizes a microservices-inspired data ingestion engine written in Laravel.
Financial data is regularly ingested from IDX data providers via REST APIs. Raw financial statements (Balance Sheet, Income Statement) are parsed, normalized, and stored in a relational PostgreSQL database. A background worker calculations engine runs the screening checks. Stocks are marked with compliance tags based on whether they clear the debt, liquidity, and non-halal revenue thresholds.
3. Watchlist Caching & Real-Time Performance
For retail users tracking personal watchlists, calculating compliance scores on every page load would degrade performance. We solved this by using Redis for data caching.
When a stock's financial details are updated by background ingest workers, the screening engine recalculates the Sharia compliance tags and invalidates the cached tags for that ticker in Redis. Watchlists are populated using the cached tags, achieving sub-10ms response times for user dashboards.
4. Subscription Billing & Payment Integration
Hissa provides both a free tier and a Pro tier featuring advanced stock screener queries and whale transaction trackers. We integrated Midtrans, a leading Indonesian payment gateway, to handle recurring subscription billing.
When a payment webhook is received from Midtrans, an event listener in the application handles updating the user's subscription state and grants or revokes Pro permissions. This secure webhook handler guarantees payment reliability and minimizes administrative overhead.
References
- Dewan Syariah Nasional MUI. (2020). Fatwa No. 135/DSN-MUI/V/2020 tentang Saham Syariah.
- AAOIFI. (2023). Shari'ah Standard No. 21: Financial Papers (Shares and Bonds). Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions.
- Otoritas Jasa Keuangan. (2024). Daftar Efek Syariah (DES) Periodical Reports.