London-based fintech startup Yielders has become the first Islamic financial firm to gain UK’s regulatory approval, Reuters reported.

Yielders is an equity-based crowdfunding platform for the UK property investment. The company has received approval from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) earlier this month.

Irfan Khan, founding director of Yielders said that upon talking over the past two years with the FCA and the Department of International Trade, it had become clear that the UK government is in need to make Britain a premier destination for Islamic fintech.

“They (the UK government) believe that outside the Middle East, the UK is the capital of fintech for Islamic finance,” he told Reuters. “There’s certainly movement in the UK to try to promote Islamic fintech, and for fintech firms in the UK to show the route forward for a lot of the Middle Eastern market.”

Britain has been recently pushing itself as a fintech hub and has been ranked as number one fintech hub globally by big four consultancy EY in a report last year.

Yielders also had to get conferred with the UK's Islamic Finance Council in order to prove and certify that the company’s business practices were compliant with sharia law. The conditions include certifying that there was no borrowing or nothing that could be construed as gambling involved.

"That’s why we decided to start on this fintech journey, because we could mitigate against all of that by driving down the costs and removing all the back-office stuff by having a fintech solution," Irfan added.