Top stockbrokers have been locked out of a mobile trading platform that will from today allow investors to buy and sell shares directly from M-Pesa.
Safaricom has tapped Kestrel Capital as the sole broker to process trades on the mobile money transfer service, in a shift from the decades-old tradition of relying on stockbrokers for buying and selling equities.
Kestrel was ranked 11th among Kenya’s 22 stockbrokers based on the brokerage commissions earned by the market intermediaries in the six months to June.
The move is intended to replicate the success in the bond market where, in 2017, investors were allowed to buy and sell bonds over mobile phones in a world first.
Top brokers are keen to be part of the M-Pesa shift known as Ziidi Trader in the hope of generating extra commissions from the expected rise of retail investors. Under the scheme, which President William Ruto is expected to launch today, anyone with a mobile phone will buy shares through the M-Pesa app, with Kestrel Capital embedded in the background.
For years, investors were required to open a Central Depository System (CDS) account with a stockbroker and only use M-Pesa for payment, not trading.
Investors under Ziidi will not require an individual CDS account because M-Pesa is pooling funds from multiple investors into a single account managed by Kestrel.
This is expected to help facilitate efficient, anonymous, and often faster share trading, which the NSE believes will rev up the participation of retail investors.
Read: NSE investors to buy, sell shares directly via M-Pesa
Kestrel is set to reap initial gains from the innovation, having shepherded the three-month pilot in trading of shares via M-Pesa.
‘Other stockbrokers will be brought on board at some stage, but the timeline has not been provided yet,’ said Francis Mwangi, the CEO and part-owner of Kestrel.
‘Being an innovation, it will still be important to open it up to the market and see what other learnings we can get and the adjustments we can make.’
Kenya’s number one stockbroker, Dry Associates, controlled commissions of Sh236.7 million in the six months to June out of the Sh1.46 billion in earnings shared by the 22 firms.
It was followed by Standard Investment Bank, Faida Investment Bank, EFG Hermes Kenya and Capital A Investment Bank.
Ziidi Trader is embedded in the M-Pesa app, including relying on Safaricom’s existing know your customer (KYC) credentials, while customers’ mobile money PINs are passcodes to authorise trading and other actions on the platform.
Individuals using the platform will be required to opt into the Ziidi Trader by launching its mini-application on the M-Pesa app after which they agree to the terms and conditions.
Investors will have an overview of the market, including all listed companies, their logos and descriptions, as well as key market data such as buy and sell orders (bid/ask prices) and available shares.
The transactions are capped at M-Pesa’s daily limit of Sh500,000.
On the backend, Kestrel will have a single CDS account, which will hold shares bought by the retail investors.
The stockbroker will receive a trading file from the NSE at the end of the trading day containing all transactions from clients and upload the same on the omnibus account.
‘By leveraging the M-Pesa KYC and not requiring customers to open new CDS accounts, the principal objective is to make the onboarding process easy,’ said Mr Mwangi.
‘The NSE has just over one million CDS accounts, but M-Pesa users are more than 35 million and that’s the target market we are looking at. We believe this innovation will be able to tap into a significant portion of the M-Pesa users within two or three years.’
The 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.
The MMF, which was approved in November 2024, has attracted nearly half of Kenya’s unit trust investors, having closed in September 2025 with 1.15 million customers, according to data from the telecoms operator.
The launch of Ziidi Trader will present a new avenue for Safaricom to earn fees under its financial services division 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.
NSE chief executive Frank Mwiti earlier said 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.
‘Leveraging M-Pesa makes it fairly seamless, and there is the ability to scale given the platform is already used by millions,’ Mr Mwiti told the Business Daily.
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 at 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 over two years.
This has meant that the boom witnessed at the Nairobi bourse has failed to reverse the drop in equity investors, which stood at over two million in September 2022.