Despite the fact that investing apps have made a big contribution to the democratization of the stock market, they sometimes operate in silos and only provide users access to exchanges in a single country.
Even platforms with a worldwide focus, like eToro, only offer access to the most well-known exchanges and a limited selection of the rest. To give a basic example, just 24 of the 118 companies listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange are available for trading on eToro.
Additionally, a lot of trading applications are only available in a single country because every brokerage is required to receive a license from the relevant regulator inside each country it operates.
In particular for emerging nations where there are few cross-border opportunities, investment apps have failed to deliver on their promise to make investing in securities easy and accessible to everyone.
Trove also provides certain Chinese firms in an effort to alleviate this issue. Companies like Bamboo, Chaka, and Trove have lately emerged in Nigeria to enable users to trade and invest in overseas markets, especially in U.S. shares and funds.
The first global brokerage app in west Africa, Bamboo launched in Ghana last month.
When the company got a $15 million series A financing in January, Richmond Bassey, the CEO, and co-founder of Bamboo stated that in addition to supporting Africans in investing outside of the continent, Bamboo will eventually strive to promote worldwide investment into Africa.
“We also want to make it easier for African investors in the diaspora to identify the best investment opportunities on the continent,” he said at the time.
Bringing African Stock Markets Together
One Ghanaian FinTech is aiming to address the issue of the continent’s fragmented capital markets by enabling anybody to invest in and trade on numerous African stock exchanges, but Bamboo has not yet made any steps to make it possible to buy non-American companies on the platform.
