When Safaricom officially launched Ziidi Trader on February 10, 2026, few could have predicted just how swiftly Kenyans would respond. Within a matter of weeks, over 84,000 small investors had purchased shares on the Nairobi Securities Exchange through the M-Pesa integrated platform, all in less than two months. Combined with 268,840 completed trades worth approximately Sh772.2 million, the early figures are reshaping what participation in Kenya’s capital markets looks like and who gets to take part.
Ziidi Trader is a mobile based share trading platform jointly developed by Safaricom, the NSE, and Kestrel Capital. It allows M-Pesa users to buy and sell NSE listed shares and corporate bonds directly from their phones, without opening a traditional brokerage or Central Depository System account, requirements that had long locked out millions of would-be investors. Users can monitor their portfolios and access market insights, all from the familiar M-Pesa interface.
511,000 investors signed up for Ziidi Trader, though active traders stood at 84,000. The average trade size over the tracked period was Sh2,872.60, a figure that stands in stark contrast to the overall market average deal size of Sh63,950, a gap that reflects the continued dominance of institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals in traditional trading channels.
Additional data from the NSE, covering February 10 to May 6, 2026, shows that Ziidi Trader’s share of overall market trades averaged 1.67 percent over the period, peaking at 4.27 percent on March 30. The busiest single day was February 11, the day after launch, when 9,320 deals were executed, while the highest daily turnover of Sh28.98 million was recorded on February 16. The platform also played a decisive role in the recently concluded Kenya Pipeline Company IPO: of the 73,000 individual investors who participated, 36,000 placed their orders through M-Pesa.
Despite Kenya having approximately 1.4 million registered investors on the exchange, only around 61,000 had been actively trading, a participation rate of just 4.3 percent. Between 2023 and 2025, the number of active investors at the NSE grew by just 0.2 percent, adding only 2,621 traders. Analysts had long pointed to two structural problems: the complexity of setting up brokerage accounts and the psychological hangover from years of bearish market performance. Ziidi Trader addresses the first head on. Where traditional stockbrokers charged minimum commissions that punished small investors, the platform makes micro investing viable. A single Safaricom share can now be bought for Sh28, rather than committing to a minimum lot of 100.
M-Pesa now serves around 37.91 million one-month active users in Kenya, providing an unparalleled distribution channel that no traditional brokerage could dream of matching. Ziidi Trader sits neatly inside that ecosystem, drawing on the trust and habit millions of Kenyans already have with mobile money.
The platform’s ambitions are also built on proven ground. Ziidi Trader is the second pillar of Safaricom’s broader Ziidi wealth management brand, following the Ziidi Money Market Fund launched in December 2024. By September 2025, the fund had attracted 1.15 million customers, roughly 47.9 percent of Kenya’s 2.4 million individual investors in unit trust schemes, and accumulated Sh12.6 billion in assets. That trajectory is precisely the template Ziidi Trader hopes to replicate in equities.
The launch has also been supported by broader market reforms. In August 2025, the NSE scrapped the requirement for investors to buy shares in minimum lots of 100, enabling true single unit trading for the first time. Meanwhile, the Central Bank of Kenya’s DhowCSD platform, upgraded in November 2025, now lets investors participate in treasury bill and bond auctions through M-Pesa for transactions up to Sh250,000, deepening the overall mobile-finance ecosystem in which Ziidi Trader operates.
Analysts have flagged the risk of impulse trading among inexperienced investors, the potential for unfavorable pricing in an illiquid market, and questions about whether the NSE’s trading infrastructure can handle a sustained surge in retail volumes. User education will be critical if the early momentum is to be sustained. The NSE’s five year strategy targets nine million active retail investors by 2029, a figure that would represent a more than 140 fold increase from where the market stood just a few years ago.
