For the average Kenyan, buying and selling shares will, from next month, be as simple as paying for electricity tokens or groceries at the supermarket: that is, with the tap of a few buttons on their mobile phone.
This is the heart of a project that the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) aims to capitalise on the success of M-Pesa, allowing investors to trade in shares directly via the mobile money transfer service.
The shift will break the decades-old tradition of relying on stockbrokers for buying and selling equities.
Under the scheme, which is at the end of the pilot phase, anyone with a mobile phone will be able to buy shares through the M-Pesa app or USSD dubbed Ziiidi Trader, with stockbrokers embedded in the background.
Presently, investors must open an account with a stockbroker and only use M-Pesa for payment, not trading.
Investors under Ziiidi will not require an individual share trading account with M-Pesa; hosting an omnibus account, which pools funds from multiple investors into a single account managed by brokers.
This helps facilitate efficient, anonymous, and often faster trading, which the NSE believes will rev up the participation of retail investors. The proponents want to replicate the success in the bonds market where, in 2017, investors were allowed to buy and sell bonds over mobile phones in a world first.
NSE Chief Executive Frank Mwiti says the direct share sale will ease the burden of opening a trading account, including selecting stockbrokers, filling out forms such as know-your-customer and waiting time.
“The solution makes coming to market seamless because one of the pain points in the process of opening an account,” Mr Mwiti told the Business Daily.
“Leveraging M-Pesa makes it fairly seamless, and there is the ability to scale given the platform is already used by millions.”
NSE’s five-year strategy seeks to bring at least nine million active retail investors to market by 2029, including Kenyans living and working in the diaspora. The idea for direct shares trading has been controversial in the recent past, with brokers accusing the NSE of wanting to usurp their role in a fallout that triggered calls to oust Mr Mwiti in June.
The NSE is betting that the direct trading of shares via mobile phones will boost the participation of retail investors in the bourse.
The market rally witnessed in the past two years at the NSE has failed to attract significant new investors, with the number of participants remaining relatively unchanged.
The Capital Markets Authority (CMA) disclosed that the number of investors buying and selling shares at the NSE only grew by a measly 0.2 percent, or 2,621 to 1.3 million traders over two years.
This has meant that the boom witnessed in the Nairobi bourse has failed to reverse the drop in equity investors, which stood at over two million in September 2022.
The NSE has staged a strong recovery since the fourth quarter of 2024, with the value of listed stocks briefly crossing the Sh3 trillion mark for the first time on November 6 before contracting slightly to Sh2.9 trillion as at the end of last week.
NSE wealth has slipped back from the record high valuation, with investors selling shares in large companies to lock in profits booked in the rally.
Analysts have attributed the low growth in individual investor accounts to inadequate knowledge of how the stock market works and trauma from years of bearish runs.
“Historically, most Kenyans have been inclined to invest in traditional assets such as real estate. It’s only after Covid-19 that we saw retail investors come to the capital markets through money market funds (MMFs), which were at the time offering double-digit returns,” Teddy Irungu, a research analyst at Rock Advisors, said in an earlier interview.
“Investor education is needed to show investors how the stock market works.”
Local individual investors’ stock trading accounts grew by 2,992 to 1,248,543, but have dropped from 1.93 million in September 2022. Current NSE returns still beat other asset classes such as bonds, real estate and bank fixed deposits.
But investors, notably retail, have continued to put extra billions of shillings in unit trusts and savings and credit co-operative societies (saccos).
Mr Mwiti hopes the direct shares trading via M-Pesa can change the picture, challenging the sluggish growth of individual accounts, and increasing investor awareness of stocks.
“The Safaricom digitrader is in the pilot phase and has both NSE and CMA approvals, with the pilot going well, given that we can already see that activity is happening in the market and we are also receiving feedback,” he added.
“Once we finish with the pilot, addressing any issues raised and do the official launch, the intention is to open up this platform to other brokers.”
The piloting of direct shares trading via the M-Pesa platform represents the latest leverage on the mobile-money platform to grow retail investing after the establishment of Ziidi Money Market Fund (MMF), a collaboration between Safaricom and two fund managers, Standard Investment Bank (SIB) and ALA Capital Limited.
The MMF, which was approved in November 2024, has attracted nearly half of Kenya’s unit trust investors, having closed September 2025 with 1.15 million customers, according to data from the telecom operator.
The Ziidi MMF ranked as the 14th largest unit trust with assets worth Sh12.6 billion at the end of the same period.
The growth of the fund’s user base demonstrates the fund’s ability to leverage the Safaricom partnership to attract users from the M-Pesa mobile money service, an accomplishment that the NSE now hopes to replicate.
The MMF is integrated into the mobile money ecosystem, enabling investors to buy and sell units via the M-Pesa mobile application or through its USSD prompt.
The number of one-month active customers on M-Pesa stood at 37.91 million at the end of September 2025.
The launch of Ziidi Trader will present a new avenue for Safaricom to earn revenues by facilitating financial services as it continues to diversify its business from just person-to-person transfers.
Safaricom earned Sh100 million in revenues from Ziidi MMF, representing about 0.6 percent of the asset base.
It, however, fails to disclose its share of earnings from its fund managers’ partnership.
Financial services represented 5.2 percent of M-Pesa revenues through six months to September 2025, or Sh4.6 billion, representing a growth rate of 13.9 percent year-on-year from September 2024.
