Zoya Finance opened its API: halal screening data for developers

October 7, 2026 · by Iftikar Please note: this post is strictly educational — a walkthrough of publicly available developer documentation. Nothing here is financial advice or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security. I am not a financial advisor, and AI-assisted content can contain mistakes. Do your own research and talk to a licensed professional before investing.

I have been digging into Zoya Finance's public API — the developer offering from the team behind the Zoya halal investing app. If you have ever wondered how an app decides whether a stock is halal, this API is literally that decision engine, packaged so other people can build on it. Here is what I found in their public documentation, explained simply.

Executive summary

Zoya — the halal investing app that helps people build and monitor Shariah-compliant portfolios — now offers its screening dataset as a public API. Instead of building your own Shariah compliance engine from scratch, you can query Zoya's: send a stock ticker, get back a compliance verdict, the reasoning behind it, and even zakat math. It is a GraphQL API (a modern way of asking a server for exactly the data fields you want), with a free sandbox for testing and paid plans for real data. The short version: halal screening is now a building block any developer can plug into an app, a brokerage, or an AI agent.

Who the API is for

Zoya's own pricing page splits the audience in two, and the split is honest:

Individual investors and researchers — people studying markets, testing ideas, or building personal tools. The personal plans are "tailored for individual investors and researchers."
Businesses and professionals — fintech builders, brokerages, advisors, and institutions that want compliance data inside their own products. The commercial plans are described as "empowering businesses and professionals."

Their launch announcement puts it more ambitiously: the API exists so developers can "build and launch world-class, Shariah-compliant financial products faster and at a fraction of the cost." If I translate that into concrete people: a developer building a halal robo-advisor, a brokerage that wants a "halal" badge next to each stock, a researcher studying compliance trends, or someone like me wiring screening data into an AI agent.

Core features of the public API

All of this comes from the official API reference. The API is organized into three namespaces — think of them as three toolboxes:

basicCompliance — the verdict. Ask for a stock by ticker ( report(symbol: "AMD")) and get back the essentials: company name, exchange, the compliance status, the report date, and a purification ratio. You can also pull the whole US list ( reports) page by page, filter for only compliant stocks, or get compliance reports for US-listed ETFs and funds ( funds). The basic package covers US stocks and US-listed ETFs using the AAOIFI methodology.
advancedCompliance — the reasoning. This is where it gets interesting. Beyond the verdict, you see why: a business screen (where does the company's revenue come from — broken into compliant, non-compliant, and questionable revenue) and a financial screen (debt and interest ratios, like debt-to-market-cap). The advanced package also covers 20+ global markets, lets you look stocks up by FIGI (a permanent security ID that survives ticker changes), and includes a dedicated MENA-region endpoint ( menaScreens).
zakat — the math. zakat.calculate takes a list of holdings and returns the zakat due. You tell it your intent per holding — ACTIVE (planning to trade within a year, treated like cash) or PASSIVE (long-term holding, where it looks through to the company's assets). It even tells you which calculation method it actually used, so the number is explainable.

How the data model thinks about compliance. This is my favorite design detail: compliance is not a yes/no flag. It is a four-value scale — COMPLIANT, NON_COMPLIANT, QUESTIONABLE (revenue sits in an area where scholars genuinely disagree, or the filings don't say enough), and UNRATED (no rating exists). The docs explicitly warn: don't let "questionable" or "unrated" silently render as "non-compliant" in your product — they mean "we cannot tell you," not "no." A status is also always relative to a methodology; the same stock can rate differently under different rulebooks. Today the only methodology is AAOIFI, and it is a required input so future methodologies won't break existing code.

How you talk to it. Every call is an HTTP POST to a GraphQL endpoint — https://sandbox-api.zoya.finance/graphql for testing, https://api.zoya.finance/graphql for real data — with your API key in the Authorization header ( sandbox- or live- prefix). The sandbox is free and needs no subscription, but its data is randomized — the docs are blunt that it "must not be surfaced as investment or compliance information." Rate limit: 10 requests per second. There is an in-browser API explorer, the full schema is published as a file your editor or AI coding assistant can read, and the announcement mentions an SDK.

How different people benefit

Concrete scenarios, based on what the API actually offers:

A fintech founder building a halal investing app doesn't need to hire scholars and data engineers to build a screening engine — the hardest part of the product is now an API call. That is the difference between a six-month build and a weekend prototype.
A brokerage or advisor platform can show a compliance badge next to every stock, like the "Blue Crescent" indicator one Middle East brokerage built on Zoya's screening tech (reported in the press — more on that below). One query per ticker, and your whole catalog is screened.
An investor setting up a startup around ethical finance can validate the idea cheaply: prototype against the free sandbox, show real screens to early users, and only pay when going live.
Someone building AI agents or tools — this is the one closest to my own experiments — can give an agent a ground-truth compliance source. Instead of the agent guessing whether a stock is halal, it queries Zoya and cites the verdict, the revenue breakdown, and the methodology. That turns a chatbot opinion into a sourced answer.
A researcher can pull the full US compliance list and study patterns: which sectors pass, how purification ratios distribute, how verdicts change over time.

Examples from their documentation

The docs include complete runnable guides — real queries with real responses. A few that show the range:

One stock's verdict: query basicCompliance.report for AMD and get back "Advanced Micro Devices Inc., XNAS, COMPLIANT" — about a minute of work, per their quickstart.
The full US list, filtered: page through basicCompliance.reports with a status: COMPLIANT filter to build your own halal stock universe.
The full reasoning: an advanced query for AMD returns the verdict plus businessScreen, financialScreen, and the revenue split — e.g. ~99.7% compliant revenue, ~0.27% non-compliant — plus AAOIFI ratios like debt-to-market-cap.
International stocks: query a London-listed ticker (symbol plus exchange code, like 0R0K-LN) for the same detailed report.
ETFs: basicCompliance.funds lists fund reports — their example shows SPDR Gold Shares as COMPLIANT and a total bond market ETF as NON_COMPLIANT, each with a purification ratio and the date the holdings data was current.
Zakat: pass in holdings with quantities and intent, and get back the zakat-liable amount and zakat due per holding and for the portfolio.

A real-world integration (press-reported, not from the docs): the Middle East brokerage amana partnered with Zoya to put real-time Shariah screening inside its trading app — a "Blue Crescent" icon marking compliant assets, one-click access to the certification behind each verdict, and a dedicated Shariah section. It is the clearest public example of what the commercial side of this data is for: a brokerage renting the screening engine instead of building one.

Pricing and the rules of the road

As listed on zoya.finance/api (check the page itself for current numbers): personal plans run from a basic tier (compliance ratings, US stocks, AAOIFI rulebook, personal-use license) up to Advanced at $139/month ($115 billed annually, adding financial ratios and 20+ global markets). Commercial plans start at $399/month ($332 annual) for the basic data with a commercial license, $1,399/month ($1,165 annual) for Advanced with priority support, and a Custom tier with bespoke rulebooks and SLAs. Two license types matter: personal (for individuals and researchers — no public display of the data) and commercial (internal display allowed; showing data to the public needs Zoya's prior written approval). Attribution is required for everyone — a "Data provided by Zoya" link near the data. And a practical security note from the docs: never expose your API key in a client-side app; proxy requests through your own server.

Why I'm writing about this

This post is about learning how finance works — and increasingly, finance works through APIs and agents. Zoya's API is a clean example of a genuinely hard problem (Shariah screening, done properly, with scholarly methodology) turned into infrastructure anyone can build on. Whether you are a developer, a founder, or just curious how the halal badge in your brokerage app gets there, it is worth understanding. I will keep experimenting with this kind of data in my own agent work and write up what I learn.

Please read: this post is strictly educational — a walkthrough of publicly available developer documentation. I have no relationship with Zoya Finance, and nothing here is an endorsement or a recommendation to use, buy, or subscribe to anything. I am not a financial advisor, this is not financial advice, and AI-assisted content can contain mistakes. API details, pricing, and features change over time — always verify against Zoya's own documentation before building anything. Do your own research, and talk to a licensed professional before investing.