A PROPOSED ASSESSMENT TOOL FOR SHARIA-COMPLIANT EQUITY CROWDFUNDING PROJECTS UTILIZING TOPSIS

Abstract

On the market, the number of newly founded fintech companies that involve sharia-compliant businesses has increased recently, one of them being the sharia-crowdfunding company. The company targets countries with large Muslim populations, such as Indonesia and Malaysia. Since the sharia compliance is unique, and thus it influences decision-making in a business. Therefore, we are driven to propose and develop an assessment tool to assist the investment signaling process for the sharia-compliant equity crowdfunding projects on Platform X. Platform X is one of the pioneers of real estate Islamic crowdfunding platforms investing in sharia-compliant real estate projects in Southeast Asia's emerging countries. The firm must examine new projects locally for each newly created branch country as the firm aims to open new branches in some predominantly Muslim countries. However, each newly founded branch country lacks a mature and uniform assessment tool for sharia-based projects, resulting in glaring problems in the 'portability' and time-consuming problem of assessing the projects. Therefore, this research provides a technique for assessing sharia-equity crowd fundraising decisions using a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), namely TOPSIS. We combine the concept of equity crowdfunding, Islamic principles, and Sharia compliance to develop a tailored assessment tool for sharia-based projects. As a result, we present both theoretical and managerial implications, and we find that the assessment tool is robust as the evaluation result for the portability aspect and the fast computational time were successfully examined through a simple experiment.