The Challenge
The Dar es Salaam Stock Exchange is the heart of Tanzania’s capital markets, yet for most Tanzanians it remained out of reach. Buying or selling shares meant visiting a licensed broker in person, filling in paper forms and waiting days for confirmation, a process that effectively excluded retail investors in rural areas and the diaspora. The result was a market with thin liquidity and low domestic participation, a weakness laid bare when the bourse recorded days of little or even zero equity trading during the Covid-19 downturn. As The Citizen put it on 8 June 2020: “Shock, surprise as DSE records zero trading.”
In November 2018 the DSE approached Magilatech to design, and jointly implement with other market stakeholders, a mobile trading platform that would open the exchange to ordinary investors and increase the number of trades. This is where Magilatech’s key strength came in. Before writing a single line of code we worked to understand the challenge itself: why Tanzanians who already moved trillions of shillings through their phones were absent from their own stock exchange. Solving it meant a solution designed around how Tanzanians actually transact, built from the ground up together with the institutions that run the market.
Our Approach
Hisa Kiganjani, “shares in your palm”, was a joint build, not a solo one. Magilatech worked side by side with the DSE, the e-Government Agency (eGA), telecom operators and partner banks to design and build the platform from the ground up, each partner bringing what it does best: the DSE the market and trading rules, eGA secure government systems integration, telecoms USSD and mobile-money access, and banks payments and settlement. The Capital Markets and Securities Authority (CMSA), TCRA, NIDA and FSDT supported the regulatory, identity and financial-inclusion dimensions.
Built together and purpose-built for Tanzania, security was designed in from day one, so any Tanzanian can open a trading account, buy and sell listed shares and bonds, follow market data and receive proceeds from an ordinary mobile phone, with no broker visit required.
Magilatech, DSE and market stakeholders at the DSE Hisa Kiganjani launch, Dar es Salaam, November 2020.
What Changed
Hisa Kiganjani was officially launched at the Dar es Salaam Stock Exchange on 21 November 2020 by CPA Nicodemus Mkama, Chief Executive Officer of the CMSA, who confirmed the platform had been approved after meeting legal requirements and international capital-market governance standards, and hailed it as a positive outcome of stakeholder collaboration in the capital markets.
The platform put the exchange within reach of Tanzania’s 49.2 million mobile phone users, more than 30.5 million of whom already use mobile financial services, with regulators targeting a 50 percent increase in the number of capital-market investors. Share trading, once confined to brokerage offices in Dar es Salaam, now happens from villages, small towns and the diaspora alike.
Officials ring the bell to mark the launch of mobile share trading at the Dar es Salaam Stock Exchange, November 2020.
Why It Matters
More than 60 percent of Tanzanian adults use mobile financial services, yet before Hisa Kiganjani almost none of them could own a share of the companies listed on their own national exchange. By meeting investors on the device already in their hands, the platform turned mobile penetration into capital-market inclusion, deepening liquidity for the DSE and giving ordinary citizens a stake in the economy.
It also captures Magilatech’s key strength: we start by understanding the challenge, find the solution that fits it, and build it from the ground up, jointly with the institutions that make the market work, and secure by design. The DSE remains a Magilatech partner today.
Investors, brokers and media at the DSE for the Hisa Kiganjani unveiling, the retail audience the platform was built to reach.
Sources & Further Reading
- CMSA yazindua mfumo wa Hisa Kiganjani, Dira Makini, November 2020
- Mfumo wa kuuza, kununua hisa kwa njia ya simu za mkononi wazinduliwa, Global Publishers, 21 November 2020
- “Surprise as DSE records zero trading”, The Citizen, 8 June 2020