DAR ES SALAAM Stock Exchange (DSE) has said the number of investors accessing the trading platform using mobile phone increased considerably in the last four months.

The bourse said the number shot up by 42.8 per cent from 700 at the end of the third quarter to over 1,000 investors at end of 4Q in 2015, and was expected to increase further.

DSE Chief Executive Officer Ms Moremi Marwa said the platform introduced last August attracted over 1,000 investors accessing the bourse mobile platform infrastructure.

“We envisage the increase of the size of mobile trading platform as more and more people gets to know the existence and operability of this technology,” Mr Marwa told Daily News.

There was a continued use of mobile trading platform in “our Automated Trading and Central Securities Depository infrastructure,” he said. The bourse chief said that the initiative enables investors to buy and sell listed shares using their mobile phones through Automated Trading and Central Securities Depository infrastructure.

The infrastructure, the first of its kind in the Africa, was launched during last year’s third quarter when CRDB listed its right issue share. The advent of the bourse mobile trading technology provides access to a wider and growing range of investment and savings instruments on the capital markets.

The platform that is user friendly envisages widening the equity and debt trading activities especially upcountry where brokers are not present.

Meanwhile, DSE said their top most priorities in this year’s Q1 include encouraging more listings, public education and awareness. “Our demutualisation process is now at the final stage, we have submitted our IPO (initial public offer) and self-listing application to the Regulator,” Mr Marwa said.

He said once they received an approval the IPO and listing envisaged to be conducted before end of this Q1. Self-listing, or demutualisation, is the process through which a member owned company becomes shareholder-owned.

Frequently, this is a step towards the initial public offering (IPO) of a company. The bourse was mutually owned by guarantee but is now called Dar es Salaam Stock Exchange Public Limited Company (PLC).

DSE, since its inception, operates as a ‘mutual’. In Africa, the first to make a self-listing move was the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in 2005, followed by the Nairobi Stock Exchange last year. Others, such as Mauritius Stock Exchange, have started the process.