Renaissance Capital gets seat, but...

As blogged awhile back, this is a good move because it will help bring in more foreign investors into the bourse which will hopefully be +ve in terms of getting:

1. Greater transparency in reporting of company information
2. Some serious compe for some of the duds currently in the bourse ghosting as brokers...

Its however disappointing that the incumbents remain scared of the local competition. RenCap will take a while to get going and will in any case probably be targeting foreign investors and institutions.

As mentioned by others, having Old Mutual would definitely have meant that a market-mover was also able to recruit stock clients.

I was however, looking forward to having NIC Capital as a broker. NIC the bank has a history of innovating and despite not having many branches, they probably have a wider distribution than any of the brokers/investment banks. And really it won't take much to be better than D&B (who can't even protect their website-mara its Universal Corporation mara its myspace) never mind all the to-ing and fro-ing for orders to be executed.

Anyway, come next year when NSE demutualises, we'll hopefully faster entry into the exchange. On that pt, hopefully you have been acquainting yourselves with NSE annual reports-they made 3 times as much from transactions compared to 2005, but a Ksh100mn profit between 18 brokers isn't a lot . Given what the three were willing to pay, I don't know where you make the money from.