Designing a Private Securities Market alongside the Central Bank of Congo

Genesis and its partner Bourse Consult were commissioned by Financial Sector Deepening (FSD) Africa to support the Central Bank of Congo (BCC) in DRC to understand the demand for an opportunity to establish a private securities market in the country.

There has been a primary market for government securities in place in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) since 2018. There is, however, no such equivalent for private securities, while demand exists from private sector institutions to access long-term funding.

A private securities market in this context refers to a market in securities issued by private institutions and corporations and includes debt issuance and shares as well as private issuances (private equity, venture capital) issued through a primary market and traded in a secondary market.

There were two important areas of research for this assignment: (1) to establish whether demand for investing in securities from private institutions existed (investors); (2) to establish whether there would be private institutions interested in issuing securities (investees).

Once it was confirmed that demand from both parties existed, the Genesis-Bourse Consult team recommended that a private securities market be established in a phased manner to allow for a fairly simplistic initial set-up that could be built on to develop a more complex capital market more broadly. The team then developed an implementation plan for the BCC to support its rollout of the private securities market.

Extensive stakeholder engagement in Kinshasa was conducted as well as comprehensive desktop research.