How we research and verify every card

Primary documents, not marketing pages

Fees and profit rates come from the bank’s own schedule of charges, key facts statement, or product disclosure sheet, which regulators in most of these markets require the bank to publish. A product landing page is where a bank puts its best case; the fee schedule is where it puts the truth. Where the two disagree, we use the fee schedule and say so.

Comparison sites are useful for finding out that a card exists. They are never our source for what it costs. Where a figure exists only on a third-party site, we mark the card as secondary-sourced rather than treat it as verified.

A quoted sentence behind every figure

For the numbers that matter most, the annual fee, the profit rate and the minimum income, we copy the sentence the number came from into the card page. If we cannot quote it, we have not verified it, and we do not print it as though we had.

Blanks, not estimates

Plenty of banks simply do not publish a figure. When that happens the field stays empty and the card page says which figures are missing. We do not infer a number from a competitor, average it across a range, or carry last year’s value forward. A confident number nobody can trace is more dangerous than an obvious gap, because you might act on it.

The contract, named

We record the Shariah structure the bank itself names, in the bank’s own words. Where a bank does not name one, we say that too, rather than inferring it from what its competitors do. A card page that guessed at the contract would be guessing about the only thing that makes the card Islamic.

What we do not do

• We do not rank cards into a best-buy table. Which card suits you depends on how you spend and what you earn, and a ranking would mostly reflect our assumptions rather than your situation.
• We do not issue religious rulings. We explain how a contract works and set out where scholars disagree, with sources. The ruling is between you and a scholar you trust.
• We do not take payment for placement. No card appears higher, or at all, because someone paid for it.
• We do not show the banks' own card artwork. It is copyrighted, and a scraped card image goes stale silently when a bank refreshes its design.

Found a wrong figure?

Tell us. Every number on this site traces to a document, but banks revise those documents without notice, and we make mistakes too. Send the card, the figure you found, and where you found it to hello@islamiccreditcards.com. We check every report against the bank’s own document before changing anything.