About Nigerian Exchange Group (NGX)
The Nigeria Exchange Group (NGX) is the marketplace for investors and businesses, which supports both public offers and rights issues in the Nigerian capital market.
With a tiered system that allows companies to join different boards based on their size and value, NGX allows investors to invest in funds, bonds, stocks, and other financial products in different companies.
Challenge
The number of active retail investors in the Nigerian Capital market is approximately 500,000, with the average investor being 50 years old. This reveals a low (and non-participation) rate of the younger generation.
With the Central Bank of Nigeria giving a recapitalisation policy to Nigerian banks to raise more money, requiring them to list their shares to be bought by the public, it was obvious that the process of purchasing shares in the Nigerian market needed attention.
Usually, buying shares in the capital market required individuals to go to stockbrokers and do lots of paperwork, which contributed majorly to the low investment rate and the underrepresentation of young investors in the market. So, to drive financial inclusion and make investment more accessible, secure and transparent, there was a need to deviate from the manual method of share purchasing to a digital solution.
The NGX decided to develop a digital platform supporting public offers and rights issues in the Nigerian capital market. The goal was to digitise the share subscription process, transforming it into a seamless and user-friendly experience for both new and existing shareholders. The results speak volumes: the platform initially attracted 60,000 new investors, a remarkable milestone, and has since grown to over 100,000 investors, revolutionizing access to the Nigerian capital market.
Assurdly Service Offering
As a consulting partner, Assurdly came on board to orchestrate the delivery of a digitised capital market acting in various capacities, centred around its Product Delivery offering to bring the vision to life.
Product Management: We aligned with the NGX team on the key requirements for the product to be delivered, eliciting input from stakeholders to ensure all deliverables were clearly understood and accurately captured. This helped us create the roadmap to follow and minimised derailment from expected outcomes.
Project Management: With defined requirements, our team got to work by decomposing the work items into weekly deliverables, identifying, managing, and ensuring constant alignment with key stakeholders involved. We monitored the project execution, identified and mitigated risks, and monitored progress to ensure timely delivery in alignment with the expected product features.
Quality Assurance: At Assurdly, we adopt a shift-left testing approach in which testing activities are performed earlier in the software development lifecycle, typically during the requirements and design phase, rather than waiting until development commences. As the features were being released, functional and usability tests were carried out to ensure every part of the product aligned with set expectations and met specific standards of ease of use, security, and efficiency.
Product Support: At product launch/Go-live, we acted as subject matter experts providing guidance and support to the capital market stakeholders such as the Brokers, Registrars, Receiving agents, Issuers, Issuing Houses and other third-parties within and outside these categories, to efficiently use the platform and integrate to NGX Invest API Gateway to enable them to support investors/users effortlessly.
Key Outcomes and Impact
Successful Launch of NGX Invest: The NGX successfully launched its digital share offering application for relevant stakeholders in the Capital market, with the following features:
- An Investor portal (NGX Invest) where Investors can buy listed Primary offers or Rights Issues
- Administrative back-office for respective Capital Market stakeholders such as the Issuers, Brokers, Registrars, Receiving agents, Issuing Houses to list, manage and monitor shares being purchased by the Investors of the offers.
- An API Gateway that allows other digital players access the NGX Invest platforms via APIs, enabling investors to buy shares through mobile apps, web apps, and USSD channels of those companies.
Digitisation of Share Selling Process: With the launch of NGX Invest, the digitisation of share subscriptions was a success, supporting share offers from organisations like Access Bank, Fidelity Bank, Guaranty Trust Bank, FCMB Group Plc, Zenith Bank, Sterling Financial Holdings, and most recently FBN Holding, attracting more than 60,000 investors as of August 2024, with a growing number of over 100,000+ investors. This directly contributed to the success of these banks raising the needed capital in a shorter time than usual.
Ease of transaction for investors: The transition from the rigours of the manual share subscription process to a digital platform made, and will make, investors’ lives a lot easier. It eliminates paperwork, reduces the time to sign up as an investor and get relevant credentials for buying initial public offers and rights.
By partnering with Assurdly, the NGX team enhanced efficiency and accelerated product delivery, resulting in a high-quality, quick-to-market solution that meets the needs of all stakeholders, in record time. We also provided additional support to investors, ensuring seamless platform adoption and instituted a support mechanism for the future maintenance of the solution.
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