'Investing For Africans': Bamboo Unlocks Access To US-, Nigerian-Listed Securities

Bamboo, an investment app that provides Africans real-time access to U.S. stocks and ETFs, recently reached 20,000 users. In observance of the development, co-founders Richmond Bassey and Yanmo Omorogbe spoke with Benzinga regarding the firm’s prospects.

What Is It?

Bamboo is a new entrant in the fractional trading space; since launching last November, the firm has processed over a million dollars in trades.

The idea behind Bamboo emerged from an inaccessibility issue.

"We wanted to invest in the U.S. stock market, but realized we couldn't," said Bassey. "About 15 months later we launched Bamboo, allowing Nigerians to access the U.S. market instantly from any device."

The firm’s core offering includes:

• U.S. and Nigerian securities
• Fractional share trading
• Portfolio tracking
• Market and limit orders
• News and fundamental data
• Technical analysis tools

Simplicity Is Key

The two co-founders told Benzinga a large portion of the target market is not financially savvy.

Bassey said the onboarding process is seamless: "The most powerful thing is how simple it is to go through the KYC process. In less than 3 to 5 minutes, you're onboarded and you can begin to trade."

After joining, Bamboo provides a wealth of news and stock data, helping users make more informed investing decisions.

"We're focused on learning, on providing information about basic fundamentals, [helping with] the decision to buy or not to buy a particular stock," said Bassey.

The Differentiator

Bamboo leverages screeners to introduce its users to companies they’ve never heard of before.

"What we've also done, in terms of indexing and segmentation, is [enable] search for companies based on industry," said Omorogbe.

"They might know about Apple, Facebook and Amazon.com -- the more obvious ones -- but what indexing different sectors does is it introduces you to ones you haven't [heard of] before,” she added.

Next Steps

The founders told Benzinga that the Bamboo ecosystem will evolve into a holistic investment solution that allows retail and institutional clients, across the African continent, access to a diverse portfolio of products like mutual funds and robo-advisory tools.

"We want to completely own the asset management space that enables investing for Africans. We see that the future of investing, in Africa, has to be driven by technology. We feel like we are very fortunate to be at the forefront of that and we want to keep riding that till the very end, so future Africans have a modern field to invest in," said Bassey.