Platinum Credit, a microlender, has listed Shs30b (about $8m) of medium-term notes on the Uganda Securities Exchange (USE).
The notes were first sold privately in September to a closed group of pension funds, asset managers and wealthy individuals.
Listing them gives those investors a secondary market in which to sell.
Fund managers in particular need that exit, even if few are expected to use it soon, since the notes pay well above what government bonds currently yield.
A listed bond also obliges its issuer to disclose more, lays its risks open to scrutiny and demands prudent corporate governance.
It is the first corporate bond on the exchange since Kakira Sugar borrowed Shs76b in December 2013, and investors bid for nearly two and a half times what was on offer.
This has reopened a market dormant for 13 years.
How the deal worked
Platinum is the Ugandan arm of Platcorp, which also lends in Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia. Over 17 years, it has moved from payroll loans for civil servants to small-business lending.
It has more than 100,000 active borrowers, and some of its loans are as small as Shs100,000 ($26).
It chose a private placement because that route is quicker and far cheaper than a public offer. The Capital Markets Authority (CMA), the regulator, then approved the listing.
For now, only the original investors can trade the notes.
The notes sit under a medium-term note programme, which is a single approval to borrow up to Shs70b, plus an option for Shs30b more, drawn in tranches as the business needs money.
For the first tranche, Platinum sought Shs20b, with an option for Shs10b more. Bids reached Shs49.3b. It took Shs30b and turned the rest away.
Esther Kakiiza, the general manager at Dyer and Blair, the arranger, says buyers were mainly pension funds, asset managers and a few wealthy individuals.
‘Most institutions tilted to the shorter term, and the high-net-worth individuals tilted mostly to the longer term,’ she says.
The five-year series alone drew more bids than the other two combined.
Tim Carson, Platcorp’s chief finance director, says months of roadshows persuaded investors that small borrowers are not high-risk if a lender knows them well.
‘We could easily have taken that full amount and gone and pushed it out. People will always take money if you are giving it out, but will they pay it back?’ says Carson.
Lending only what borrowers can repay, he argues, is what keeps Platinum’s write-offs low.
Most of the money will be lent to small-business owners on longer terms with smaller instalments, says Albert Abaasa, Platinum’s managing director.
‘Some of it will be applied to pay off foreign-denominated debt, which helps us in our accounts, because the foreign exchange really can hit and erode anything that you have made,’ he says.
Platinum hopes to return ‘very soon’ for the rest of its programme.
Why the market slept
A corporate bond is an IOU sold to many investors, repaid on a fixed date often years away. Its virtue is length because Ugandan banks mostly lend short.
‘Every business owner here knows the frustration of short-term money,’ says Paul Bwiso, the Uganda Securities Exchange (USE)’s chief executive.
‘You have a five-year plan, but you are funding it with a facility that wants to be repaid in 18 months. You are building a factory, a network, a loan book, and your financing keeps pulling you back towards the short term,’ he adds.
Since the East African Development Bank listed the first issue in 1998, only nine issuers have used the market, among them MTN, Stanbic, Standard Chartered and Kakira Sugar, raising about Shs290b between them.
After Kakira, nothing. Savings are not the problem. Unit trusts managed Shs7.1 trillion by June 2026, up 55 percent in a year, and fund managers looked after another Shs7.5 trillion, largely for retirement schemes.
The problem is where it goes. Government outbids everyone. It borrows heavily at home, and in mid-2025 its bonds yielded between 15.8 and 18.1 percent.
Now, the question is, why lend to a company when the Finance Ministry pays almost as much?
Fund managers keep 82.6 percent of their assets in government bonds and 0.2 percent in corporate ones. Unit trusts hold no commercial paper at all.
In 2024/25, CMA recorded no corporate-bond activity whatsoever. Tax tilts the field further.
Interest on government securities is taxed at up to 20 percent, but an investor who sells them on the secondary market for more than he paid keeps the gain tax-free.
And since 2024, the income of private-equity and venture-capital funds regulated by CMA has been exempt from income tax.
Corporate bonds enjoy no comparable relief, and markets follow incentives. CMA says it is lobbying for a kinder tax regime.
Banks are the other competitor. A bank loan can be arranged in about three weeks while getting a capital-markets instrument approved can take around six months.
For a mid-sized family firm, a bond also means audited accounts, a prospectus, governance rules, advisers’ fees and years of disclosure, all for money not much cheaper than a bank loan. That explains why issuers have mostly been banks and other lenders.
They already lend across different terms, understand credit and live with heavy disclosure. So, selling bonds simply lets them lengthen their funding.
‘Banks have a different profile of clients. They have the short end, and they have got the long end and the medium term,’ says Bwiso.
‘You will find a bank is already financing a factory or a manufacturer at the short side of it, so they can borrow through the corporate bond market to increase that tenor and profile for lending.
They already also understand the business of these clients,’ he notes.
What changed
Three things made the deal possible. The first is rules. Regulations introduced in January 2025 created a formal framework for private placements and let CMA grant justified waivers, which made Platinum’s route from private sale to listing possible.
The second is timing. Bank of Uganda issued Shs5 trillion of Treasury bills and bonds in April-June 2026, 30 percent less than a year earlier, and government bond yields fell by between 1.75 and 3.2 percentage points over the year.
Platinum also moved before the central bank raised its policy rate from 9.75 percent to 12 percent, its first move in three years.
The third is price. What matters to an investor is not the coupon but the premium, or spread, over a comparable government bond.
In June government’s three-year bond yielded 13.3 percent, its five-year 14.5 percent and 10-year 15.6 percent.
Platinum pays about three points more at three and five years, and three to four points more at eight.
That is enough to lure investors from government paper, yet modest for a microlender, which suggests they trusted its record.
Carson says Platinum writes off about 5 percent of its loan book a year. The cushion could thin because long-dated government yields rose by about a point in the second quarter.
What the regulator expects
CMA sees listing as the start of an issuer’s obligations, not the end. Dennis Kizito, the CMA director of market supervision, calls access to the market ‘a commitment to sustained accountability’.
‘Timely and meaningful disclosure. Stewardship of the funds raised and integrity across the transaction and the secondary market,’ he lists the three as key commitments to the public.
What comes next
The deal proves that institutions will buy corporate debt from an established financial firm at the right price.
Uganda has only about 241,000 unit-trust accounts, against 3.6m in Kenya, with an average balance of $7,900, four times Kenya’s.
The big buyers are few and concentrated. Two managers, Old Mutual and SBG Securities, run 71 percent of unit-trust assets, and three fund managers control 79 percent of the money run for pension schemes and other institutions.
This means a handful of investment committees can make or break an issue.
How to bring more companies into issuing corporate debt divides analysts.
The first camp, which includes analysts at USE, sees credit ratings as the key.
A rating is an independent agency’s verdict on a borrower’s ability to repay. It is expressed as a grade investors can compare.
Rated firms would raise money privately or publicly, set up note programmes, and eventually list. But ratings cost money, and Uganda has only one licensed rating agency.
The second camp argues that many firms fear disclosure more than cost, since a public offer exposes their accounts and plans to competitors.
It wants an over-the-counter market, where deals are negotiated directly or through dealers, and companies share information only with the investors who trade their securities, similar to what Platinum did.
Kenya has tried this. In 2021, the Nairobi Securities Exchange launched an Unquoted Securities Platform for unlisted firms’ shares and private placements, and in 2024 the regulator licensed a separate over-the-counter bond venue.
But trading on the unquoted platform has been thin. An over-the-counter market solves the disclosure problem but does not create buyers by itself.
Government bonds already trade over the counter between banks, but Uganda has no regulated platform for unlisted companies’ shares or debt, so CMA would need to create one.
Advocates want USE to capture trading that already exists, in private share transfers registered at Uganda Registration Services Bureau and in shares of Saccos.
The idea is untested, and Saccos answer to a different regulator.
A quicker fix may come from commercial paper, a company’s short-term IOU, typically repaid within a year, used for working capital such as stock or payroll.
Uganda has no functioning market for it, mainly because approval takes about six months while firms need cash within weeks, so they go to banks.
The USE has asked CMA for authority to approve repeat issues in under a month, as with Treasury bills, for issuers that keep an up-to-date credit rating.
Fund managers warn that strict rating rules could push issuers back into private deals.