Retail Investors Storm NSE Bond Market

Good evening. It’s Brian from The Kenyan Wall Street. 

In today’s newsletter, the bond market is proving to be an attractive investment vehicle as individual bond accounts at the NSE rose to 3,010 at the end of Q1 2026, up from 757 in Q1 2025. Moreover, the derivatives market has not been left behind, recording all-time highs and a flurry of activity…

These and more stories…

Retail Investors Storm NSE Bond Market 

By Harry Njuguna

Kenya’s bond market has, for a long time, been an institutional preserve of banks, pension funds, and insurers trading among themselves while retail participation remained negligible and largely static. That pattern is now breaking, with individual investors entering the market at a pace that finally shifts the composition, not just the volume, of activity. The surge in retail accounts is arriving alongside record turnover, suggesting that access, awareness, or yield conditions have aligned to pull individuals into what was once a closed circuit. What is emerging is not just a bigger bond market, but a broader one. However, whether this marks a democratization of fixed income or a response to temporary market conditions remains an open question.

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Equity Bank Expanding South? 

By Harry Njuguna 

Equity Group Holdings is pursuing bank acquisitions in Angola, Zambia, and Mozambique, chief executive James Mwangi said, as Kenya's most profitable lender moves to extend its regional footprint along the continent's mineral and trade corridors. The push into Southern Africa follows record FY2025 results in which the group posted a 55% rise in profit after tax to KSh75.50 billion, with regional subsidiaries contributing 51% of banking profit before tax. The Democratic Republic of Congo, where Equity is now the second-largest lender after acquiring two banks in 2015 and 2020, posted a 58% jump in profit to KSh24.70 billion.

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Crypto Experts For Hire

By Brian Nzomo

For years, CBK treated crypto as a peripheral curiosity, issuing cautionary notices while the market grew in the background and largely outside formal supervision. . That posture is now being replaced by construction, as the regulator builds a dedicated unit to license and oversee virtual asset firms entering the financial system. The “crypto experts” it is recruiting are not symbolic hires: they are expected to evaluate wallet providers, stablecoin issuers, and payment processors, while also designing the supervisory rules that determine who gets access to the market in the first place. In effect, the central bank is importing technical fluency it does not currently possess, embedding it inside a licensing pipeline that will sit at the intersection of payments, capital markets, and financial crime regulation. 

Read the article here >>>>> 

What You Should Watch!

Music looks glamorous on the outside, but the money story behind it is very different. Breaking into global markets as an African artist can cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, while local streams generate only a fraction of that value.

In this episode, Just Ivy Africa sits down with Moriasi Omambia, General Counsel and Head of Business Affairs at Sauti Sol Group, to unpack the real economics of the music industry, from discovery to global success.

Heads Up

OPINION : Artificial Intelligence is the Future of Capital Markets Research in Africa

In global markets, AI has already become a co-analyst by reading filings, parsing tone, and turning language into investable signals with a depth of data built over decades. When that same machinery is applied to African equities, it encounters something closer to silence: sparse disclosures, inconsistent reporting, and financial histories that resist clean interpretation. The risk is not just that the models perform poorly, but that they perform convincingly wrong, projecting precision onto data that lacks the structure to support it. The real opportunity is not in adopting global tools wholesale, but in building local datasets and models that can translate African market realities into signals and investors can actually trust.

Ken Tobiko Oidamae writes >>>>>

Don’t miss this Tomorrow!

The future of work in East Africa is shifting and organizations are being forced to rethink what truly drives performance. Join us on April 30th at 6:00 PM EAT for a deep dive into how Gen Z expectations, employee wellbeing, and recognition are reshaping today’s top workplaces.

Hosted by Dennis Kaboro, Analyst at The Kenyan Wall Street, this session brings together leaders at the forefront of people, culture, and performance.

Featuring:
Tim Hanson – WorkL
Caroline N Mwangi – HR, OD & Governance Consultant
Sabano Blessed Peace – Fido Uganda

🗓️ April 30th, 2026
⏰ 6:00 PM EAT

🔗 Register to watch live — https://lnkd.in/eRXp7q-b

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