An asset manager in Lagos wanting exposure to a Ghanaian listing faces a problem that would be trivial in most developed markets. The security exists, the capital exists, and both parties want the trade. What sits between them is not price discovery or appetite — it is infrastructure.
Understanding why is useful, because the difficulty is rarely where people expect.
It is not primarily a technology problem
The instinct is to assume African exchanges lack modern trading systems. Mostly they don’t. The major exchanges run credible matching engines and have done for years.
The friction sits in everything around the trade: who is permitted to place it, where the securities are held afterwards, how the money moves, and which regulator is satisfied at each step. Those are institutional problems, and they don’t yield to better software alone.
Four sources of friction
Market access is jurisdictional. Placing an order on an exchange generally requires a licensed broker in that market. A firm licensed in Kenya is not thereby licensed in Ghana. Reaching another market means a relationship with a licensed participant there — negotiated, documented and maintained.
Custody does not travel. Securities bought on one exchange settle into that market’s depository. A firm holding assets across several markets holds them in several places, each with its own arrangements, reporting and reconciliation. Back-office complexity grows with each market added, and it grows faster than linearly.
Currency is two problems, not one. Buying a Ghanaian security requires cedis; the investor’s capital may be in naira, shillings or dollars. That is the visible problem. The less visible one is repatriation — converting proceeds back and moving them home, subject to whatever rules apply that month. Several African markets have periodically restricted outward flows. A trade that cannot be exited is not really an investment.
Regulation is per-market and moving. Each jurisdiction sets its own rules on who may participate, what must be reported and how funds may cross. Those rules change, and 2026 has seen unusually active enforcement — Ghana’s SEC gave online investment platforms until 31 August to complete licensing and has publicly named operators working outside the perimeter. For an investment firm, a counterparty’s regulatory standing is not a detail.
Why this compounds
Each friction is individually surmountable. A firm with sufficient time and legal budget can establish a broker relationship in another market, open custody, arrange currency and satisfy the regulator.
The difficulty is that this must be repeated per market, and the cost is largely fixed regardless of how much the firm intends to trade. That maths works for a large institution taking a strategic position. It rarely works for a mid-sized firm wanting modest exposure to three or four markets — which is most of the continent’s investment industry.
The result is capital that stays home for structural rather than commercial reasons, and markets thinner than the underlying interest justifies.
What changes it
Nothing about this is unsolvable, but it isn’t solved by any individual firm working alone. It requires infrastructure operating across markets, licensed in each, with the exchange and broker relationships already in place — so that access becomes a decision rather than a project.
That is the problem SecondSTAX exists to address, for investment firms across Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and beyond.