SHARIAH GOLD INVESTMENT IN MALAYSIA: PROSPECTS AND CHALLENGES

Malaysia encompasses three types of offerings in gold investment platform. The often and traditional way of gold investing is through physical gold investment. The physical gold investment includes of gold bar, gold wafer, gold coin and to name a few. Since the development of the banking system, Gold Investment Account (GIA) or Gold Savings Account (GSA) was emerging beginning from the year of 2010 in Malaysia. Following, the advancement and sophisticated of financial technology (FinTech), blockchain has launched for the sake of convenience in terms of time and cost of gold storing. Notably, there are two approaches of gold investing in Malaysia viz shariah-based gold investment and conventional-based gold investment. Accordingly, this paper explores the focal of prospects and challenges on shariah gold investment in Malaysia to tap the gap of scarce studies examining the prospects and issues in gold investment. Indeed, Muslims are vital for choosing and involved on the shariah-based products and services in daily life. The gold services provider must adhere to the needs of the Shariah essence on gold transaction. The reason is to avoid the breaching on the Shariah law as well as biased to other parties. Therefore, this paper adopts the qualitative research method for the discussion. It perhaps may help and shed some light towards Shariah gold investment from the context of Malaysia.