Shabba exists to build the disciplined liquidity infrastructure that African capital markets have always needed but never had. Two markets today. A continental operating model over the next decade. The same patience and the same standard across every step.
Every functioning capital market in the world arrived by deliberate construction. Regulators wrote the rules. Exchanges built the venues. Brokers connected the participants. And market makers, the boring kind, showed up to quote continuously through the slow years before anyone noticed the market was working.
In most of Africa, the regulators, exchanges, and brokers are now in place. What remains missing across most of the continent is the last layer: the disciplined algorithmic provider that keeps the books deep enough for the rest of the system to be useful. That is the layer Shabba is here to add.
We are not a generalist financial firm with an Africa strategy. We are a firm whose entire reason for existing is to build that one layer, in this region, patiently, for the next twenty years.
Operational equity market-making on the Dar es Salaam Stock Exchange. Algorithmic options market-making on NSE NEXT in Kenya, on the licensing pathway with NSE and CMA Kenya. Two markets, one operating standard, real fills on both books. This phase is the foundation that every later step rests on.
Engagement with the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, the continent’s deepest equity and derivatives venue. Different scale, different microstructure, different competitor set. The work is to translate the operating model we built in East Africa into a market that already has serious algorithmic participation, and to find the specific places where our approach adds genuine depth.
A continent of capital markets that work the way modern markets work: tight spreads, deep books, reliable settlement, harmonised derivatives infrastructure across jurisdictions. We will not build every venue. We will be the operating standard that participates in many of them, with local entities, local partnerships, and the same technology stack underneath.
Not a luxury that follows development, but a precondition for it. Without functioning markets, the capital that should be funding businesses, pension obligations, and public infrastructure stays on the sidelines or leaves the continent entirely. Building the market is upstream of every later economic outcome.
The Tanzania and Kenya exchanges have the institutional rigour, regulatory frameworks, and growing demand that justify serious infrastructure investment. They are also small enough that one disciplined operator can move the curve materially. Starting where the leverage is highest is not a small bet, it is the right bet.
We build each market entity as a ring-fenced operating company under the jurisdiction it operates in, holding the licenses that jurisdiction requires. The algorithmic operating model is shared. The regulatory posture is local. Speed of expansion is bounded by the time to earn each authorization, not by the time to deploy code.
Capital markets are built over decades. The decisions that matter most are the ones whose payoff lands years after the work is done. We are structured to take those decisions and to talk about them honestly along the way, without the buzzwords that often substitute for substance in this industry.
A continent where the question is no longer whether the local market works, but what you want to do with it.
If the next decade goes the way we expect, African capital markets stop being an asterisk in global allocator memos and start being a serious destination for institutional capital, hedge programmes, and structured product issuance. We do not build all of that. We build one specific, unglamorous piece of it, and that piece is the prerequisite for everything else.