Over the last year, Symbiotic Media has been working on EasyHisa with Standard Investment Bank to implement the our robust messaging technology and gateway to realize the vast benefits that EasyHisa has to offer including diaspora access to their accounts via sms from their country of residence.

It is great to finally have EasyHisa out. Standard Investment Bank have come out strongly as being forward thinking and early adopters….but most importantly I commend their support of  local talent and competence…they did not import technology from outside our borders but chose to engage local qualified companies and individuals  such as ourselves to make the product a success.

Time and again at different forums I advocate for firms to engage local developers to develop the industry as well as set Kenya apart in the African region for software development.

More importantly, the current extensions under development will see the stock trading business overhauled yet again with real-time bank account access and plugin to all major available money transfer services to allow investors take full advantage of real- time information and trading.

Here is an excerpt from SIB chairman’s speech, more pictures and video to come…

Every few years, there is a leap in technology that changes how we do our work, how we invest or how we live our lives. The cellphone changed our lives in ways we never imagined. In the Capital markets there was the Central Depository System and the Automated Trading System, which improved the efficiency of the trading cycle from weeks to 5 days. The wide area network further enabled stockbrokers to trade from the comfort of their offices.

We need to keep our market intadem with the innovations coming through information technology.

We introduce EasyHisa, as the next leap in technology that will change how we trade on the Nairobi Stock Exchange once again. This is an important milestone in our Capital Markets.

Easy Hisa is a new sms service from Standard Investment Bank that allows an investor to rade shares from the comfort of their home or office. The service is so efficient that certain paribus, an order sent is processed and delivered to the exchange within one hour.

Let us ask ourselves, how much it costs to trade on the exchange currently?  Along with the commission to the Stock broker there are other extra costs to you the investor.

There is the cost of transportation in which our customers, through our research, have informed us to be between KShs 100 and KShs 1,000.

There is the cost of time away from your employment, business or family.  A lot of customers cannot leave their employment or business during the week and sacrifice instead to come in on Saturday when they could have been taking care of other personal matters.

The third is the cost of opportunity.  This cost, suffered by some investors, is one that is very important when trading in shares.  Profits that you could have made may be lost if you cannot trade instantly.

With Easy Hisa these extra costs are greatly reduced or eliminated altogether.

For instance, remember that Safaricom went as high as Kshs 7.80 before going down to the current prices we see today, Now imagine that a simple SMS would have enabled you to lock in such a profit as you continue with your day to day business.  That is why you must have Easy Hisa today.

This service enables you to, among other things, place orders, check the balance in your account or the value of your shares and even hold an order if the price has moved in a way you did not expect.  As you can see, there is true control over your shares with this service.

In conclusion, our esteemed customers continuously call for us to improve our service beyond their expectations and we continue to accept the challenge.

The Chairman of the Capital Markets Authority, Mr Cheserem during the University challenge, also asked the industry to face up to this challenge and offer mobile trading among other services and therefore this Launch of the SMS trading is also an answer to that call.

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Easy Hisa,

Trade shares anytime anywhere via SMS.