After building The Kenyan Wall Street, Hisa, and Bullish Africa, becoming an ETF issuer is the next, logical step for Wall Street Africa. It is where media, data and distribution meet product. Writes Erick Asuma, Co-founder and CEO of Wall Street Africa Inc.
Last year I stood on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange for the first time and did something every visitor does: I looked up at the numbers running across the tickers and tried to make sense of the scale. I returned again this year, and the second visit sharpened rather than dulled that first impression.
On an average day, the US market trades over a trillion dollars. Here at home, the Nairobi Securities Exchange trades a very tiny fraction of that, some days just a few million dollars. The exact figure moves, but the order of magnitude doesn’t: our market is a rounding error next to New York’s, by turnover.
But it isn’t the number that stayed with me.
What stayed with me is this: despite that gap, our markets have, over long stretches, delivered better returns than many of the world’s deepest exchanges. African markets don’t have a liquidity problem because they are bad markets. They have a liquidity problem because it is an access problem. Too few instruments, too few ways in, and too much of the investment decision resting on picking a single stock correctly.
That is the gap Wall Street Africa is stepping into.
Why an issuer, and why now
Wall Street Africa is built on the idea that African capital markets are underserved not by capital, but by information and access.
The Kenyan Wall Street has spent close to a decade building the media layer — the news, the data, the explainers that help retail investors and institutions alike understand what is actually happening in these markets.
Hisa, which we built and later saw acquired, was our first attempt at building the distribution layer, putting the market directly into people’s hands.
Becoming an ETF issuer is the next, logical step. It is where media, data and distribution meet product.
That has always been the idea behind the name. Wall Street Africa (WSA was never meant as a borrowed label, it is a statement of intent. Part of our mission is to be the bridge that connects African markets to global capital, and global capital to African markets, in both directions. An ETF issuer sits naturally on that bridge: it is, by design, a vehicle that both local investors and international institutions can use to access the same underlying exposure, through the same regulated, transparent instrument.
It is the same bridge we built physically through Bullish Africa, our investment summit series that brings African issuers, banks and policymakers face to face with global capital, in New York during UN General Assembly week, and on home ground in Nairobi. If Bullish Africa is where we put African opportunity in front of the world’s investors in person, once a year, an ETF is where we put that same opportunity in front of them every trading day. Product, media and gathering are three expressions of one mission.
On 11 August 2026, the Capital Markets Authority announced the approval the WSA Banking Index ETF ,the first locally domiciled exchange-traded fund on the NSE, and only the third ETF listed on the exchange altogether, alongside Absa NewGold and the Satrix MSCI World Feeder ETF. That approval matters far beyond WSA. It says something about where Kenya’s capital market is in its own evolution, and it hands us a genuine responsibility: to introduce a product category to a market that, by and large, has never traded one.
The idea in one line
Right now, if you want exposure to Kenyan banking, you have one option: pick a bank. Equity Group, KCB, Absa, Stanbic, Co-op, you choose one, or you build a personal spreadsheet trying to hold several, rebalancing manually, absorbing the transaction costs and the company-specific risk of getting one name wrong.
An Exchange -Traded Fund (ETF) is a basket of different investments (like stocks, bonds, or commodities) bundled into one fund that you can buy or sell on a stock exchange.
An ETF changes the question. Instead of “which bank should I buy?” the investor asks “do I want exposure to Kenyan banking?” One listed instrument, tracking a rules-based basket of the NSE’s banking constituents. It doesn’t replace stock-picking for those who want it, it gives everyone else a way in that doesn’t require becoming an equity analyst first.
That is the whole idea: from buying a bank, to owning the banking sector.
We are localising something proven
I want to be honest about what is genuinely new here and what isn’t.
The ETF wrapper itself is not an experiment. It has more than three decades of history, from the Toronto 35 Index Participation Units in 1990, to SPY becoming the first US-listed ETF in 1993, to the Financial Select Sector SPDR Fund treating “financials” as a single tradable allocation since 1998. Globally, ETF assets have gone from about US$151 billion in 2003 to over US$13 trillion by the end of 2025. That is not a niche product anymore. It is infrastructure.
To put that scale in perspective: this June, Vanguard’s S&P 500 ETF, VOO recently became the first exchange-traded fund in history to cross US$1 trillion in net asset value. Reuters reported that the fund reached this milestone less than 18 months after overtaking State Street’s SPDR S&P 500 ETF to become the world’s largest ETF. A single fund, tracking a single index, now holds more in assets than the entire GDP of most African economies combined. That is the ceiling the ETF wrapper has reached in its most mature market, not because the structure is exotic, but because, as I stood on that NYSE floor last year, it became the default way an enormous share of American savings finds its way into equities.
Closer to home, South Africa is the precedent that matters most to us. The JSE listed its first ETF, Satrix Top 40, in November 2000. Twenty-five years later, that market has 129 ETFs and well over R250 billion in ETF market capitalisation. That did not happen on day one. It happened because products, platforms, regulation and investor education were built together, over years. We should expect nothing less — and nothing faster, here.
So this latest innovation from Wall Street Africa is not the instrument. It is applying a globally established structure, for the first time, to a locally domiciled Kenyan banking-sector index.
What we are actually building
I don’t want The Kenyan Wall Street‘s readers to hear “Wall Street Africa launched an ETF” and think that’s the whole story. It isn’t. It is one product sitting on top of everything else we’ve built — the newsroom, the data infrastructure, the events and the intelligence work that all put African markets in front of institutional capital at home and abroad. An ETF issuer that also owns the region’s leading financial media platform is in an unusual position: we don’t just have to sell a product, we get to teach the category it belongs to.
That is deliberate. Before we ask anyone to subscribe, our job is to make sure they understand what an ETF actually is, what it costs, how it trades, and what risk they are still carrying, because a sector ETF diversifies you across banking, not across the whole economy. If the banking sector has a bad year, this product will have a bad year. That is not a footnote; it is the point of an honest product.
The bigger bet
Underneath all of this is a bet on Africa that I’ve held since I first walked onto a trading floor in Nairobi as an intern more than a decade ago: that the constraint on African capital markets was never the quality of the underlying businesses. It was the absence of the infrastructure, the data, the media, the products — that let capital, local and global, actually find its way in.
A market trading a few million dollars a day will not become a trillion-dollar one by accident, and it will not become one just because we tell a good story either. It will grow the way every mature ETF market has grown: product by product, education cycle by education cycle, one investor at a time understanding a little more about how to put their capital to work.
We’re building the first piece of that in banking. It will not be the last.
Read more:
Wall Street Africa Launches Q1 2026 Kenya Banking Sector Report
Wall Street Africa Group Launches Inaugural Kenya Banking Sector Report
A Guide to Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) in Kenya
