• UMOA-Titres will unveil the UTMarché platform on January 22, 2026

• The system aims to improve price transparency and liquidity in the secondary market

• Secondary market trading rose 57% in 2025 to more than CFA5,400 billion

After years of planning and groundwork, UMOA-Titres will unveil an electronic platform for secondary trading of government securities on Thursday, January 22, 2026. Known as UTMarché, the platform aims to improve price transparency and liquidity across the WAEMU regional financial market.

Long announced by the Union’s monetary and financial authorities, the project seeks to address one of the main gaps in the regional market: the lack of a centralized and transparent price formation mechanism for sovereign debt. Until now, while primary issuances of Treasury bills and bonds have been well structured, trading activity after auctions has largely relied on bilateral transactions that are poorly visible and difficult to track.

According to data published by UMOA-Titres, activity on the secondary market picked up sharply in 2025. Over the full year, more than CFA5,400 billion worth of securities were traded, up 57% from 2024. The number of transactions increased by 66%, while 453 instruments were traded, pointing to a gradual broadening of the market.

Momentum was particularly strong at the end of the year. In December 2025 alone, traded volumes reached nearly CFA748 billion, up 83% year on year, despite a slight slowdown in the final week of the year, a period usually marked by balance sheet adjustments. UMOA-Titres now aims to build on this trend.

Improving price transparency

With UTMarché, UMOA-Titres plans to better structure the secondary market for government securities by providing authorized participants — banks, asset managers, and institutional investors — with a shared platform for listing and trading. The stated objective is to improve price transparency and support liquidity across the maturity curve.

The platform is expected to allow broader dissemination of market information, including yields, traded volumes, and price benchmarks. This is a key issue in a region where government securities play a central role in state financing and represent a core asset class on bank balance sheets.

Fiacre E. Kakpo