Islamic Contract Architecture for Digital Deferred Payment: A Three-Layer Conceptual Framework for Shariah-Compliant BNPL Regulation

Abstrak

Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) platforms have spread across Indonesia's e-commerce sector without a Shariah-specific governance framework. This leaves Muslim consumers in deferred payment arrangements whose religious status remains unresolved. This study applies doctrinal analysis and conceptual synthesis, reading classical fiqh sources on bay' al-taqsit against contemporary instruments, including AAOIFI Shariah Standards and DSN-MUI fatawa. The aim is to identify why conventional BNPL fails Shariah requirements and to build a governance framework for Indonesia. Five sources of non-compliance surface: contractual ambiguity blocking valid aqd formation, revenue structures replicating riba al-nasiah, asymmetric risk distribution violating al-ghunm bil ghurm, penalty charges exceeding the ta'widh standard, and interface designs constituting tadlis through concealment. OJK's 2023 suspension of Akulaku confirms these are not abstract concerns. Existing scholarship treats them separately, producing taxonomies without governance, behavioural studies without legal structure, regulation without theory. The article responds with an Islamic Contract Architecture for Digital Deferred Payment: a transactional layer built on bay' al-taqsit with wakalah agency, a risk layer using a tabarru'-based cooperative guarantee, and a transparency layer treating gharar and tadlis prohibitions as design obligations. For regulators, this translates into a dedicated product classification, extended Shariah oversight of algorithmic and interface design, and a cost-derived cap on late fees, mapped against OJK, DSN-MUI, AAOIFI, and IFSB instruments. The contribution is conceptual: contract, governance, and consumer ethics treated as interdependent rather than sequential compliance steps, a category absent from the literature.