Société de gestion et d'intermédiation africaine de bourse (SGI-AB), subsidiary of Société Ivoirienne de Banque (member of Moroccan group Attijariwafa Bank), launched last Thursday in Abidjan, a new online trading service called “Bourse Connect”. 

This is a first in Ivory Coast and this should allow customers to have an autonomous access to necessary tools for the management of their securities portfolios. “This will be made possible, via an interface which can be accessed on the bank’s website,” said Daouda Coulibaly (picture), SIB’s managing director, during the presentation ceremony. 

This service comes as a number of investors seems to have decided to exit Abidjan’s stock market. The years of significant growths of shares’ value after the socio-political crisis the country was experiencing, are now replaced by a situation of stabilization of the listed firms’ capitalizations. The shares market struggles to exceed a value of CFA6300 billion at the moment, from close to CFA8000 at the beginning of 2016.  

The BRVM Composite, the index regrouping all listed firms on this stock market, has the worst performance among the main African stock indexes followed by African Markets. At October 16, 2016, they had incurred a loss in value of 19.8% since January 1, 2017. 

In the ECOWAS, other stock markets, namely those of Ghana and Nigeria recorded better performances (+37.28% and +36.3% respectively) over the same period. 

Idriss Linge