Kenya’s Capital Markets Authority (CMA) has approved a new exchange-traded fund from Wall Street Africa (WSA), a Nairobi-based financial media and fintech company.
The fund will let investors buy into a basket of banks listed on the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) through a single investment, rather than purchasing each stock separately.
A first for Kenya’s ETF market
Every ETF on the NSE until now has come from South African issuers — the Absa NewGold ETF, which tracks physical gold, and the Satrix MSCI World Feeder ETF, which tracks developed-market equities abroad. The WSA Banking ETF breaks that pattern as the first fund built and domiciled in Kenya, with a listing targeted for the fourth quarter of 2026.
According to the Capital Markets Authority, the fund will “seek to replicate, as closely as practicable, the performance of the designated NSE Banking Index by investing all its assets in the constituent banking sector shares.”
CMA Chief Executive Wyckliffe Shamiah called the approval “an important milestone in the continued development of Kenya’s capital markets.”
Why banking, why now
Eric Asuma, founder and chairman of the Wall Street Africa Group, told Channel Africa’s Africa In Business, hosted by Thami Ngubeni, that the approval reaches beyond a single product. “This is about expanding and widening our capital markets and innovating in our capital markets,” he said.
Markets like Johannesburg have long had locally listed ETFs, Asuma noted, but Kenya’s two existing funds are both foreign-domiciled products simply listed on the NSE. He pointed to the banking sector’s track record as the reason to start there — Kenyan banks rank among the best performers globally on return on investment, per The Banker magazine, and bank stocks are among the NSE’s most liquid and heavily traded.
“We’ve created one basket that tracks the entire industry… within the simplest, best, most efficient and transparent way,” Asuma said.
Inside the fund
The ETF tracks all 11 listed banks — Equity Group, KCB Group, Co-operative Bank, Absa Bank Kenya, NCBA Group, Standard Chartered Bank Kenya, Stanbic Holdings, I&M Group, Diamond Trust Bank, HF Group and BK Group. Because both the ETF units and the underlying shares trade in Kenya shillings, investors avoid the currency risk that comes with holding foreign-linked products.
Banking stocks have driven much of the exchange’s recent rally. The NSE Banking Index returned 30.9 percent in 2026 through July, outpacing bonds and every other major index on the exchange, and has gained 62 percent since its October 2025 launch. Among individual lenders, I&M Group posted the largest year-to-date gain among the bigger banks at 60.6 percent, followed by Stanbic Holdings at 47.5 percent and Co-operative Bank at 46.1 percent, according to NSE data.
Asuma, speaking to Ngubeni, added that Safaricom — majority-owned by Vodacom Group — remains the NSE’s dominant telecom listing, with banks the next-largest and most actively traded segment. He said the exchange draws significant international capital flow from Europe, the United States and South Africa, which Wall Street Africa aims to serve with more transparent, easily accessible products.
A fast-rising exchange
Asuma described the NSE as one of Africa’s top five markets, behind Johannesburg in scale but growing quickly. As of the end of July, he said, Nairobi ranked as the fourth-best-performing stock exchange in the world, trailing only Nigeria among emerging and frontier markets and ahead of several developed exchanges.
Separate reporting on the exchange’s performance through June 2026 shows the NSE up 33 percent year-to-date, ranking fourth globally behind South Korea, Nigeria and Japan, with total market value crossing KSh 4 trillion for the first time — a run led largely by Safaricom and the listed banks.
Asuma credited regulatory openness for creating room for products like the ETF, pointing to the recent move allowing Kenyans to buy stocks using mobile money embedded in the M-Pesa platform as a major driver of retail participation. That, combined with the exchange’s push for new products, he said, shaped Wall Street Africa’s decision to launch the fund — drawing on his experience building Hisa, an earlier Nairobi venture that let Kenyans access fractional U.S. stocks on the Nasdaq and NYSE.
How Africa’s wealthy build and fiercely guard generational wealth
What still holds the market back
Asked by Ngubeni about the obstacles facing Kenya’s capital markets, Asuma pointed to familiar frontier-market concerns: investor uncertainty about macroeconomic conditions, though he said the currency has stabilised and inflation has been improving. Foreign-currency volatility, once a major deterrent, is now largely resolved, he added.
The bigger gap, in his view, is a shortage of innovative products — a contradiction, he said, given Nairobi’s positioning as a gateway to Africa’s capital markets while remaining comparatively illiquid. He also cited weak integration with global capital markets, describing his ambition for Nairobi to become “the Hong Kong of Africa,” connecting African markets to New York, Dubai and London.
Wall Street Africa’s data and intelligence products, along with an annual New York event called Bullish Africa held alongside the UN General Assembly, are part of that effort; this year’s edition is scheduled for September 22.
What comes next
Speaking to TechCabal, Asuma said Wall Street Africa is targeting between KES 5 billion and KES 7 billion in committed capital at launch, with retail investors expected to eventually make up most of the fund’s holders. Tradiam founder Eric Ruenji said his team’s “focus is now on completing the remaining operational and listing requirements” ahead of the targeted fourth-quarter launch. A full information memorandum and subscription timetable are still to come.
For investors, the pitch is diversification: rather than taking on the risk of a single bank’s performance, the ETF spreads exposure across all 11 listed lenders, smoothing out weak spots at any one bank — though at the cost of forgoing outsized gains from picking a single top performer.
Asset Allocation: The Key to a Well-Balanced Investment Portfolio
