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New M-Pesa trading app takes 55pc of share orders
President William Ruto (centre) rings the bell during the launch of the Safaricom's Ziidi Trader at the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) on February 2, 2026.
More than half of share orders at the Nairobi bourse on Monday were transacted through the new M-Pesa platform, underlining the power of the mobile money service in bring retail investors to the market.
Safaricom data shows that 7,962 of 14,300 orders for sale and purchase of stocks were directly processed from M-Pesa, marking the first time investors were transacting in shares without going through stockbrokers.
This gave M-Pesa stock platform known as Ziidi Trader a 55 percent share of the stock transactions, with analysts saying its performance was limited by the Sh500,000 cap on mobile phone transactions.
Ziidi Trader, however, accounted for 2.0 percent of the value of the shares traded on Monday ahead of the Tuesday's official launch, indicating that its success is hinged on the volumes.
Safaricom and the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) are betting that the direct trading of shares via mobile phones will boost the participation of retail investors at the bourse.
“What this shows us is the potential that exists. And all this has happened within a period of three days,” said Esther Waititu, the chief financial services officer at Safaricom.
“The success of M-Pesa has been on the strength of partnerships. The same will apply in this case. If you think of APIs (application programming interfaces), we have an open platform, which means anyone technologically enabled can connect with us. We want to continue in that spirit,” she added.
Under the scheme, which President William Ruto launched on Tuesday, anyone with a mobile phone will be able to buy shares through the M-Pesa app, with Kestrel Capital embedded in the background.
For years, investors were required to open an account or a Central Depository System (CDS) account with a stockbroker and only use M-Pesa for payment, not trading.
Investors under Ziidi Trader will not require an individual CDS account because M-Pesa is pooling funds from multiple investors into a single account managed by Kestrel Capital.
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.
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 telecom operator.
The launch of Ziidi Trader presents 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.
The NSE has just over one million CDS accounts and Safaricom bets that its M-Pesa base of 35 million users will grow the share of stock traders.
“If we can get the mama mboga and boda boda person into the capital markets, then our work becomes segmenting the market from a bigger pie and not from the small pie we have right now,” said Francis Mwangi, the CEO of Kestrel Capital.
Kestrel is the sole broker embedded in the M-Pesa App.
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 at the Nairobi bourse has failed to reverse the drop in equity investors, which stood at over two million in September 2022.
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.
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.
The proponents want 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.
