veri blog

South Africa’s formal Afreximbank membership closes the continent’s most significant multilateral finance gap and commits $8 billion to industrial, trade, and transformation priorities. On 4 February 2026, at a formal ceremony attended by President Cyril Ramaphosa and Afreximbank President Dr George Elombi, the Republic of South Africa officially acceded to the Establishment Agreement of the African Export-Import Bank, becoming the 54th state to join Africa’s leading multilat

Canal+’s historic JSE listing is the clearest statement yet that Africa’s largest exchange has reached the international standing that demands institutional-grade indexation to match. On 3 June 2026, Canal+, the global media and entertainment company that completed its acquisition of MultiChoice in 2024, will conduct a secondary inward listing on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. The listing — which awaits final JSE approval confirmed as imminent at the time of writing — will

Africa’s $2 trillion in pension and sovereign wealth assets has crossed from mobilisation into execution — and the infrastructure to deploy it rigorously is the defining requirement of this moment. In February 2026, more than 200 institutional investors gathered in Mauritius for the ninth edition of the Pension Funds and Alternative Investments Africa summit — PI Africa 2026. The theme was ‘Empowering Africa’s Institutional Capital for Growth and Development’, and the backdro

Nigeria’s $5 billion total return swap is the continent’s clearest signal yet that African sovereign financing is evolving faster than the infrastructure designed to track it. On 24 March 2026, President Bola Tinubu submitted a request to Nigeria’s National Assembly for approval of a $5 billion external borrowing programme structured as a total return swap with First Abu Dhabi Bank, the largest lender in the United Arab Emirates. By 31 March — seven days later — both chambers

AfCRA is not about giving Africa better ratings — it is about giving Africa accurate ones, built from data that reflects the continent’s real economic structure. In February 2025, at the 37th Ordinary Summit of the African Union in Addis Ababa, African heads of state gave formal political endorsement to an idea that had been building for years: a continental credit rating agency, owned and operated by Africa, headquartered in Mauritius, and designed to assess African sovereig

Kenya’s Ziidi Trader proves that Africa’s retail investor base is not a future ambition but a present reality — and that the infrastructure to serve it must be built to match. On 10 February 2026, Safaricom and the Nairobi Securities Exchange launched Ziidi Trader, embedding direct share trading into the M-PESA Super App. The platform went live to a market of roughly 35 million M-PESA users in Kenya, removing the requirement for a separate CDS account, a licensed broker relat

A credible hard-currency venue in an unlikely setting is exactly the kind of development a rules-based reference architecture is built to evaluate on its merits rather than dismiss on its reputation. The received wisdom about Zimbabwean capital markets, for most of the last decade, has been straightforward: interesting to watch, difficult to size, structurally complicated by a currency environment that makes institutional engagement challenging. That wisdom has been defensibl

A continental payments rail that works is upstream of every capital-markets activity that crosses a border — and the maturation of PAPSS is exactly the kind of quiet, compounding development institutional investors should be paying closer attention to. There is a rhythm to capital-markets infrastructure stories on this continent. The announcement gets covered. The first transaction gets covered. Then there is a long, unglamorous middle period in which the system either goes o

An African market moving up the index-family ladder is not a category change for one country — it is a credibility export for the continent, and the kind of event indexation discipline exists to handle cleanly. The most important thing to understand about a market reclassification event is that it is not primarily about the market being reclassified. It is about what happens to everything around it when the label changes. Egypt is now close enough to a serious upward reclassi

Rwanda is the cleanest proof on the continent that market architecture, not market size, determines relevance — and that is exactly the kind of market Veri was built to make legible. I want to make an argument this week that cuts against some instinctive allocator habits. The habit is to equate market size with market relevance. Larger market, more attention. Smaller market, less attention, or none. That habit is defensible in a world where the architecture of a market scales

Why the Ethiopia Securities Exchange is the clearest signal yet that African capital markets are running faster than the narrative around them — and why Veri was built for precisely this moment. I want to talk about Ethiopia. But to do it honestly, I have to start somewhere else. For most of my career, when I told people I spent my working life thinking about African capital markets, the response sat somewhere between polite interest and polite scepticism. The markets were sm

A USD 5 billion listing in Lagos is the first real test of whether African public markets can absorb African champions at scale — and it is exactly the kind of moment Veri was built for. A company of this scale does not list in Lagos by accident. A deal of this scale does not price in Lagos by sentiment. It prices there because the market is now credible enough, deep enough and institutionally prepared enough to carry it — and because the alternative, routing to London or New

For many years, the dominant investment narrative around Africa has focused on access — how African investors can reach global markets, how capital can be moved outward efficiently, and how portfolios can be diversified beyond domestic borders. That access matters. But it is not the end goal. The next phase — and the one we are now actively building toward — is about bringing capital into Africa . Once continental connectivity is in place, once listed, OTC, and private placem

One of the most important milestones we’re working toward this year is completing full platform connectivity across the African continent. Not partially. Not selectively. But properly — in a way that respects local markets, regulatory frameworks, and the realities institutions operate within every day. By the end of Q2, our objective is clear: to have Africa fully covered across all investment environments we provide. That starts with what already exists today — access to li

One of the things I’m most looking forward to as we return to Kenya is the opportunity to sit down with clients and partners and talk openly about what’s coming next — not in abstract terms, but in very real, practical detail. 2026 is a pivotal year for Veri. Not just in terms of platform development, but in how we structure and deliver services to meet the evolving needs of institutions across Africa. At the core of what we already provide is live trading capability , which

In Africa, context matters. No two markets are the same. No two institutions operate under identical constraints. And no serious financial business thrives by being forced into a rigid, one-size-fits-all framework. That’s why at Veri, we’ve never seen ourselves as just a technology vendor or a service provider. We see ourselves as a working business partner . When we engage with clients across the continent, the starting point is never the platform. It’s the business. We take

This Sunday, I travel back to Kenya with our CEO and co-founder, Craig Wetton , and it marks our first trip of the year. As always, there’s a genuine sense of excitement — not just about the journey itself, but about what lies ahead. We’re returning to continue conversations, to strengthen relationships, and to crystallise work that has been building over time with clients and soon-to-be clients we’ve met, spoken with, and worked alongside on real solutions. This trip isn’t a

Africa is often spoken about as if it were a single place. A market. A narrative. An opportunity. In reality, Africa is 54 countries—each with its own economic structure, regulatory framework, political history, financial system, and pace of development. Treating it as a homogeneous whole isn’t just inaccurate; it’s operationally dangerous. I’ve learned that the real challenge isn’t ambition. It’s understanding. When you work across African markets, surface-level knowledge is

Some challenges attract you not because they are easy, but because they stretch something you know you haven’t fully developed yet. For me, connecting Africa as a cross-border trading continent is one of those challenges. Africa is not a single market. Not a single rhythm. Not a single way of doing business. It is a mosaic of histories, regulatory environments, economic realities, and deeply rooted cultural norms. From the outside, it’s often spoken about in broad strokes. Fr

For decades, a simple rule defined African trade: If a Kenyan company wanted to pay a supplier in Zambia, or a Ghanaian importer needed to settle a bill in Rwanda, the money went on a long, expensive detour through the U.S. dollar and a chain of foreign correspondent banks. In 2025, that rule is being rewritten. Africa’s cross-border payments market is already worth around US$329 billion a year and is projected to more than triple to US$1 trillion by 2035 , according to a ne