Mobile Apps Are Bringing A New Generation Of Investors To African Stock Markets
An unlikely revolution is quietly underway across Africa’s stock markets. For decades, trading was the preserve of pension funds, asset managers and wealthy individuals. Today, a new generation of investors is buying shares from their phones, with amounts that would once have been considered too small for traditional brokers to serve profitably.
In Nigeria, domestic retail investors traded NGN 2.86 T (USD 2.07 B) worth of equities between January and May 2026, according to Nigerian Exchange data. That is a 138.76% increase year-on-year, with retail investors now accounting for 36.22% of all trading activity on the exchange. Over 151 days, they traded an average of USD 18.94 B naira (USD 13.72 M) in stocks daily.
In Kenya, Ziidi Trader, a mobile platform launched in February by Safaricom in partnership with the Nairobi Securities Exchange, has crossed KES 1 B (~USD 7.7 M) in cumulative turnover within four and a half months. The platform recorded 351,440 individual trades, with an average transaction size of just over KES 3 K (USD 24.00). By contrast, the wider market’s average deal size over the same period was KES 72.7 K.
The apps powering the boom
The growth is being driven by mobile-first investing platforms that are lowering the barriers to entry. In Nigeria, Bamboo, Trove, Risevest and Cowrywise allow users to buy shares from their phones with small amounts.
Bamboo, which launched access to Nigerian stocks in May 2024, overtook CardinalStone, an institutional investment firm, to become the exchange’s largest broker by weighted market share in April 2026. It executed 542,582 trades that month, giving it an 11.13% market share. The average trade size on Bamboo was just NGN 71.6 K (USD 52.00), compared with CardinalStone’s NGN 2.57 M.
“In April of this year, we became the number one broker on the NGX,” Richmond Bassey, co-founder and chief executive of Bamboo, told TechCabal recently. He added that 73% of Bamboo’s users are between 18 and 34 years old.
In Kenya, Ziidi Trader is embedded directly into the M-PESA app, allowing users to buy and sell shares without opening a traditional brokerage or Central Depository System account. About 511,000 investors signed up within weeks of launch, with 84,000 actively trading in the first two months. The platform played a key role in the Kenya Pipeline Company IPO, with 36,000 of the 73,000 individual investors placing orders through M-PESA.
A continental shift
South Africa’s EasyEquities has long been a pioneer in low-cost retail investing, while Egypt’s Thndr was ranked the fastest-growing company in Africa by the Financial Times in 2026. In Nigeria, Chaka recently rebranded to Hisa, expanding its retail investment offering across Nigeria and Kenya. Afrinvest is rolling out direct IPO subscriptions and exploring cross-border investing.
Traditional financial institutions are responding. Stanbic IBTC has launched BluNest, and Meristem offers Meritrade. The Nigerian Exchange introduced NGX Invest, an e-offering platform, in 2024.
Despite the boom, African stock markets remain shallow. Nigeria’s exchange is valued at just USD 109.3 B, compared with South Africa’s Johannesburg Stock Exchange, which is worth roughly USD 1.46 T.
“There isn’t a lot of high-frequency trading activity. Our market is still very young, and there are many challenges to solve,” Bassey said.
Mobile investing has succeeded in bringing more Africans into the market. Whether it can help transform these exchanges into deeper, more liquid markets now depends on whether there will be more listings and new products to match the growing appetite of retail investors.
