He saved $8k as a teen, but lost it in bad investments. Now he champions Islamic finance

Muhammad Ridhwaan Radzi is the managing director of Muslim investment platform RizqX.

SINGAPORE – Muhammad Ridhwaan Radzi’s first lesson in investing came early in life at age 17, when he invested $1,000 in an Islamic fixed deposit with CIMB Bank.

His interest in Islamic finance deepened as he began creating content, conducting research and organising community events on the subject in Singapore in 2023.

“(I realised that) discussions around halal investing consistently drew the highest engagement, yet practical tools and access remained limited,” said Ridhwaan.

This led him to start building RizqX in his final year at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), where he was pursuing a business degree specialising in international trade and a minor in entrepreneurship. He graduated in 2023.

Ridhwaan, now 30, co-founded Rizqx with a partner he met during national service, who is now an Oxford PhD candidate specialising in AI and machine learning. Their investment platform is designed to give Muslims in South-east Asia access to halal, or syariah-compliant, investment opportunities that are often fragmented, under-publicised or difficult to evaluate.

While building RizqX, Ridhwaan and his team identified a major gap that is often overlooked in the investment journey for Muslims: the payment of zakat on investments.

Zakat is a compulsory wealth contribution in Islam that includes cash, gold, insurance-related savings and other assets, distributed to designated recipients, including the poor and needy.

“Many find it difficult to calculate zakat accurately across different investment assets, or to manage distribution in a transparent and structured way,” he said.

Zakat is typically 2.5 per cent of a person’s wealth if it reaches a minimum threshold, after it has been held for at least a year.

To address this gap, Ridhwaan and his team built a zakat calculation and distribution platform that allows users to calculate zakat across 16 different asset and investment categories, choose the calculation methodology they follow, and specify their preferred beneficiaries across multiple approved organisations.

“The idea received early support from NTU, went on to win a competition at NUS, and subsequently received backing from NUS as well,” said Ridhwaan.