Safaricom Ltd expects Kenyans to start trading stocks on their mobile phones early next year, using a product it developed to enable customers to buy government bonds, Chief Executive Officer Bob Collymore said.
The platform which will work just like M-Akiba that was initiated in September as a way for low-income earners to buy fixed-income securities for as little as 3,000 shillings. The government postponed the start of the service in October due to rise in interest rates.
“When we designed the product, we designed it for trading equities and then the government came along and they said ‘why don’t we do it for bonds as well,’” Collymore said in an interview in London on Tuesday. “We do intend to trade stocks. I think it will happen early next year.”
What’s driving the growth in mobile trading? It’s due in part to technological improvements that have erased most of the difference in speed and reliability between trading from a phone and trading from a PC. The rise of tablets, which keep mobile traders from having to squint at a phone screen all day, has no doubt helped, too.Internet usage in Kenya has been on the rise and Safaricom expects the uptake to be mostly by the youth who mostly use their phones to access the internet.
