The African Securities Exchanges Association (ASEA) has begun working on a project to link seven stock exchanges in Africa by 1Q2021, ASEA President and Casablanca Stock Exchange boss Karim Hajji said, according to Bloomberg. This project will allow brokers in Cairo, Casablanca, Abidjan, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Lagos, and Port Louis to place orders on each other’s exchanges. It has received funding of close to USD 1 mn from the African Development Bank, says Hajji. We previously noted that the EGX has already completed all necessary preparations to join the project.

An IFC-funded privatization tie-in: The International Finance Corporation (IFC) is funding a study to look into the feasibility of privatization through stake sales in state-owned companies on African exchanges, Hajji says. State listings could accelerate the development of the continent’s capital markets, raise funds for governments, and give investors broader participation in national projects, he adds. Hajji didn’t get into much detail about the specifics of this IFC-funded study, but we can only hope at this point that the study ends up helping or guiding our very own privatization program, which has been in limbo and only saw a single company — Eastern Tobacco — sell a stake last March.

The timing couldn’t be better for Egypt’s stock market: News of the linkage project picking up steam came only a day after EGX boss Mohamed Farid said on Sunday that the bourse is essentially headhunting companies to list on the EGX as equities are struggling with low trading volumes and a dearth of IPOs. Farid’s comments imply that the linkage project is a welcome prospect for its potential to create pan-African equity indices that could reduce the overall risk to investors.

REGULATION WATCH- ُEGX to publish aggregated financials of stockbrokers on its website: Separately, the EGX has built a new program to improve its collection of data on the brokerages and securities intermediaries on its membership list, according to a news release. Brokerages were asked to send recent financial statements that were aggregated on the system and published on the EGX’s website. The move will allow the exchange access to quicker and more efficient data analytics that it can use to mitigate market risks.