Kenyan mobile money users have doubled the number of active retail investors on the country’s main stock exchange, just six weeks after the bourse opened trading on the M-Pesa platform, executives said at Semafor’s Next 3 Billion event.
Safaricom executive Esther Waititu, who is also CEO of M-Pesa Kenya, said 200,000 people were trading using an M-Pesa-linked app since its launch in early February, doubling the number of active retail traders and accounting for “60% of the trades happening on the securities exchange today.” Frank Mwiti, CEO of the Nairobi Stock Exchange, said mobile money access was the cornerstone of the bourse’s strategy to broaden access to the general public: The NSE is betting on widely used mobile money platforms to reach its target of 9 million traders by 2029.
African policymakers are keen to deepen capital markets by bringing more citizens into the financial system. They hope such moves will help reduce the need for government reliance on foreign borrowing at high interest rates and provide domestic funds to support infrastructure development.