Aiming to address the scarcity of Islamic investment offerings out of Singapore, Arta Finance introduced four Shariah compliant investment portfolios as satellite strategies on its AI-guided trading platform, Country Director Amanda Ong told IFN Investor.
“We serve only accredited investors who have said this is an underserved segment, where available offerings tend to be priced at the higher end. A few of our clients asked if, using our AI platform technology, we could offer Shariah compliant strategies in a more scalable way.”
These requests came as the Arta platform has a lower US$25,000 minimum entry for investments – which Amanda said is lower than the typical US$100,000 to US$250,000 threshold on offerings by other entities, which can include private bank opportunities.
Furthermore, real-time updates on investment data – including annualized returns – are shown upon adjustments to portfolios on the Arta digital platform. “This is useful for folks who earlier had to do the research themselves for individual stocks, especially to find out which are Shariah compliant.”
Taken in combination, these advantages have led Arta to currently manage a total US dollar AuM in the hundreds of millions – despite its operations beginning out of San Francisco only in November 2023 and out of Singapore in October 2024.
Its AI technology, drawing many lessons from Arta’s founders – who were previously senior team members at Google involved in Google Pay, Google Finance plus the Chrome OS and Chrome Books – has also attracted over 140 investors like Peak XV, Ribbit Capital, Coatue and Singapore’s EDB Investments.
The Singapore base is critical as Arta CEO and Co-Founder Caesar Sengupta was previously involved with building and scaling up Google Pay in Singapore – becoming the first global Google product built outside of Silicon Valley. Amanda said it was also the first global Google product launched in India, then Singapore and later in the US.
This Google Pay achievement attracted the support of EDB Investments as Singapore is keen to be an AI hub – which led to the Arta incubation of over a year in Singapore. “The intention was always to launch in both countries. It’s just that the US license came through first before Singapore’s.”
With overall staffing of about 100 equally divided – including the tech development team – between San Francisco and Singapore, Amanda said Arta Singapore is well-positioned to act as a global hub to serve clients outside the US.
While the portfolio and satellite strategies are mainly focused on US equities at the moment, expansion plans include offering equities from other main markets. The Arta platform also offers private credit and venture capital opportunities – but these are mainly curated from third party fund offerings. Amanda said none of these are Shariah compliant yet.
Given that Arta’s Shariah satellite strategies were just launched, Amanda explained these are offered with equal weighting of components drawn from its US equity options – unlike the optimized default allocation for its conventional portfolios.
“If someone is very bullish about a particular stock or wants to optimize it in a particular way themselves, they can do so right away with the Shariah strategies and get an immediate back-test to help them decide how to invest.”
“We are also seeing traction in our B2B business, where we partner with banks and financial institutions to offer our products and services for their clients.” Such an arrangement has been forged with Abu Dhabi’s Wio Invest, and Amanda said more of such opportunities are being explored by Arta in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
