• African Alliance Kenya Investment Bank announced its exit from stockbroking, to focus on asset management, digital and treasury business. Clients are to transfer their CDS accounts to other stockbrokers by July 22. It will continue to operate as a licensed investment bank and fund manager and plans to launch several new funds. 
• AIB Capital and Apex Africa are finalizing a deal announced in February 2020 to merge their stock-broking, bond-trading, derivatives, research and corporate finance businesses that will operate as AIB-AXYS Africa. To effect this, all Apex Africa capital accounts will migrate to AIB by June, without disrupting services, and AIB Capital will move to Apex Africa premises in Westlands, Nairobi.
• Genghis Capital and EGM Securities have announced a partnership to give investors a wider range of alternative asset classes including online currencies, commodities, precious metals, oil, and biotech company stocks. EGM runs FX Pesa and the partnership, which is on a revenue share basis, envisions enabling Genghis clients to purchase shares of Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, Zoom, Moderna and Gilead Sciences. 
• NSE App: Finally the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) has also launched online share trading through a new app that enables people to open CDS accounts on their phones and start trading listed company shares. The app, available on Android and iPhone, makes it easier to get live share prices, and view data of ongoing trade activity, with personalized notifications, chats, and financial news. 

• NSE Training: The NSE has also been conducting investment training classes virtually to show people how to invest online, open accounts, choose stockbrokers, manage portfolios, and invest in derivatives.  
• CMA stats: Statistics from the Capital Markets Authority (CMA) show that Nairobi had a net outflow by foreign investors worth Kshs 11 billion in the first quarter of 2020, compared to inflows of Kshs 601 million in the first quarter of 2019. 

Also:  

• Market capitalization was down 15% down to Kshs 2 trillion, from 2.3 trillion in Q1 2019. CMA stats also show that while Kenyan equity trades in the first quarter of 2020 were down 5% compared to the previous year, in (much smaller) Uganda and Tanzania, trades were up astronomically, by 315% and 433%, respectively.
• Ultimately, Nairobi stockbrokers need a new IPO to fuel investor interest in the trading shares, and it should probably be through a huge government privatization on par with Safaricom, which the last major government IPO in 2008. Since then there have been IPO’s from Co-op Bank, British American (2011), the NSE itself in 2014, and the Stanlib Fahari I-REIT (2015).
•  On the derivatives counter, introduced in 2019, there was 47% more activity in Q1 2020 to compared to Q4 in 2019. KCB was the most active (138 contracts worth Kshs 6.6 million), followed by Safaricom and Equity Bank. Meanwhile,  the New Gold ETF is 93% traded by foreign investors.  NSE stats show that AIB is the leading arranger of NSE futures deals, doing about 41% of deals worth 5.2 million, followed by Sterling Capital (28%) and Standard Investment Bank (9%).
• Collective investment schemes currently have 52% of their portfolios in government securities, 26% in fixed deposits and 12% (Kshs 9.2 billion) in listed NSE firms.