If you happen to stay in Africa, it’s doubtless that you would be able to simply purchase Amazon shares than you may be capable of purchase shares of a neighborhood market in your nation’s nationwide trade or that of a neighbouring African nation. Mystocks Africa is making an attempt to repair. As U.S.-listed equities take in billions in African capital by apps like Bamboo and Risevest, Mystocks is betting that the following frontier of fintech isn’t sending capital out—it’s holding it in, circulating it throughout Lagos, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Accra, and Gaborone.
Based in 2024 by Humphrey Kebaya and Mooketsi Morolong, Mystocks Africa, a mobile-first funding platform, is constructing a unified brokerage that permits each retail and institutional buyers to commerce throughout Africa’s main inventory exchanges from a single app. Traders can commerce in native foreign money, obtain real-time analytics, and have entry to an AI-powered portfolio intelligence.
The app affords real-time buying and selling throughout 5 African inventory exchanges—Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Botswana, and South Africa—with plans so as to add Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia later this yr. Customers can open an account in 24 hours and start investing with as little as $10. Past equities, the platform helps buying and selling in authorities bonds, cash market funds, and ETFs. It additionally unlocks entry to different belongings like REITs and carbon credit—asset lessons which have traditionally been inaccessible to or illiquid for retail buyers throughout the continent.
The challenges of constructing a Pan-African brokerage
The promise of cross-border African investing faces two deeply rooted constraints: regulation and infrastructure.
Each market Mystocks enters comes with its personal capital markets authority, compliance regime, and interpretation of brokerage exercise. For now, the startup operates by licensed native companions, however deeper integration will ultimately require direct licenses in every nation. That course of could be each pricey and unpredictable. Then there’s the difficulty of know-how itself. Whereas exchanges just like the JSE and NGX have mature APIs, many others don’t. Mystocks has discovered itself providing to co-develop digital plumbing simply to allow dependable order circulation and market knowledge. Constructing a pan-African brokerage, in some ways, means constructing a continental infrastructure in actual time.
Nonetheless, Mystocks is transferring with urgency. The corporate can be constructing a devoted IPO portal that can permit each African and worldwide customers to take part in public listings in any supported market. For years, African startups have struggled to go public as a result of native markets lack depth and retail participation. By aggregating demand throughout a number of nations, Mystocks hopes to inject new liquidity into African listings. The group is already making ready for potential high-profile IPOs like Flutterwave’s, with ambitions to incorporate such offers immediately on the platform.
The corporate’s product suite additionally features a subscription-based terminal known as “Bridge” that provides institutional customers market intelligence, analysis insights, and AI-driven analytics—primarily a Bloomberg terminal tailor-made to African markets. Whereas Bloomberg fees as much as $22,000/yearly, Mystocks’ Bridge product is priced at $199 for establishments and $8/month for retail buyers. Even at its least expensive tier, Bridge features a real-time information feed, squawk field alerts, and customized inventory steerage powered by generative AI.
The enterprise of investing
This diversified product stack feeds a multi-pronged income mannequin. Mystocks earns from buying and selling commissions, subscription charges, FX conversion margins, analysis gross sales, promoting, and affiliate partnerships. It additionally sells aggregated knowledge and order circulation to institutional purchasers. To drive retention, the startup layers on push notifications, payment rebates, referral bonuses, and gamified options like buying and selling competitions.
Mystocks has already signed up over 5,000 customers forward of its launch, all through natural channels—WhatsApp teams, LinkedIn outreach, and meetups—in keeping with Kebaya. The group initiatives 10,000 customers post-launch and a minimum of 25,000 energetic buyers by year-end. Institutional curiosity can be choosing up. The startup is in conversations with hedge funds and buying and selling companies from Wall Avenue and Dubai, seeking to allocate capital to African markets at scale.
“Funds are largely solved. Credit score is getting there. However investing? That’s the place the following progress lies,” Kebaya stated. He refers to it as “Fintech 3.0”—the third pillar of African monetary infrastructure. In contrast to credit score and funds, that are extractive, investing is additive. It builds wealth, creates possession, and deepens native economies.
Mystocks’ ambitions stretch past product options. The group is planning a pan-African ETF to pool retail capital throughout borders and intends to roll out robo-advisory instruments that permit customers deploy AI-driven funding methods with minimal friction. They’re additionally exploring tokenization as the following section—imagining a future the place African equities are fractionalized and traded on blockchain rails.
However at its core, the promise of Mystocks lies in entry. The entry to purchase a inventory in Nairobi whereas residing in Lagos. The entry to hitch an IPO from Morocco whereas based mostly in New York. And the entry to lastly construct wealth in African markets from throughout the continent itself.
If Mystocks executes properly, it may change into the Bloomberg + Robinhood for Africa—a single layer by which Africans and establishments globally work together with African monetary belongings.