JSE SA Trade Connect Conference 2026: Addressing structural reforms and attracting investment

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JIMMY MOYAHA: The JSE SA Trade Connect conference will be taking place [on Thursday 19 February], and we’re going to be taking a look at that in a bit more detail and taking a look at what to expect from this year’s gathering. I’m joined on the line by the head of equity and equity derivatives, Vuyo Mashiqa, to take a look at this and see what to make of it.

Vuyo, lovely having you on the show. Thanks so much for taking the time. Tell us about the Connect conference. This is something that has been running for many years in South Africa.

But tell us, for those of our listeners who don’t actually know what happens at this conference, what it’s all about.

VUYO MASHIQA: Thank you. Good afternoon, Jimmy, and to your listeners. The JSE Trade Connect conference is the JSE’s annual equity market structure conference.

In simple terms, that means it’s the one day in the year where all the key players who make South Africa’s markets work – so that includes the buy side, the sell side, regulators, policymakers, tech providers and the JSE itself – we get into one room to talk honestly about how the market is built, how it’s changing, and what we need to fix or improve.

We launched the Trade Connect conference in 2019 because there was a clear gap.

South Africa had a lot of investment conferences, but very few platforms focused on the plumbing of the market.

I’m talking about things like liquidity, trading costs, regulation, technology, product innovation and the reform agenda.

What was happening is that those issues were being discussed in silos. You had asset managers in one forum, brokers in another, regulators somewhere else.

So Trade Connect was created to join that conversation up.

Effectively, the goal of the conference is to create a technically credible forum where you’ve got senior people who can really unpack what’s happening to our market.

From the competition and fragmentation to new products and …assets, trading infrastructure, and then most importantly, translate that into action.

So basically, the feedback coming from that, for instance, from the JSE perspective, we use that to feed directly into our strategy and prioritisation of things.

Also, that helps us in terms of the engagements we have with the regulator as well as the government.

It also helps us to think about things like market connectivity, cost of access, new products, and how we support South Africa’s broader reform agenda.

JIMMY MOYAHA: Vuyo, what’s on the agenda for this year’s conference?

VUYO MASHIQA: That’s a very good question. It’s a very wide-ranging agenda and we’ve got some senior stakeholders from the local market, as well as from the global front.

I would say that there are three clusters of conversation that are pivotal for this year. They are important because they speak both to the investment case for South Africa as well as the plumbing that will make or break that case.

So firstly, for the keynote, we’ve got Ms Cathy Gibson, who is the global head of trading at the buy-side firm, Ninety One.

She’s going to be framing what disruption of the capital market model really means in practice.

So basically, things like moving away from the traditional trade and selling setups to integrated platforms where things like liquidity, data and risk management are tightly coupled, and now you’ve got things like digital asset tokenisation, which is becoming more mainstream, and what does that mean for market access and settlement?

Then we will move on to another critical pillar, which is the policy and reform dialogue. We’ve got panel discussions, for instance, focused on the market reform dialogue, which has the deputy governor of the Sarb [South African Reserve Bank], Ms Fundi Tshazibana; it’s got the deputy commissioner at the Financial Sector Conduct Authority [FSCA], Astrid Ludin; and then we have Mr Rudi Dicks from The Presidency.

So that will really unpack, for instance, things like Operation Vulindlela, market conduct and also some of the thinking from the Sarb perspective, both from a Prudential [Authority] and also some of those monetary indicators as well.

Then later on we’ve got a discussion on Operation Phumelela, which is a business-driven initiative on driving reforms, which is being led by various senior stakeholders within the financial markets.

So really, that session is to unpack the progress and developments that are coming from that.

Then the other discussions which we have, which are also just as important, we’ve got, for instance, a session with the buy-side C-suite executives who will unpack some of the challenges they’re facing on their side from an asset allocation perspective and how they balance things like global diversification for local investing and also balancing that against market depth on the local side of things.

Then other panels will look at things like data and tech, and then we have product development as well.

So putting all those things together, then you start to really get a picture of the real inflection points that are affecting the whole industry.

JIMMY MOYAHA: Some very important conversations affecting the financial industry and financial markets. These conversations take place tomorrow [Thursday 19 February] in Cape Town.

Unfortunately, folks, if you want to attend the event, it is sold out, but you can keep an eye on the event at www.jsetradeconnect.co.za. All the information will be on that website. All of the speakers, all of the agendas and all of the discussions

We will leave this conversation though on that note. Thanks so much to the head of equity and equity derivatives at the JSE, Vuyo Mashiqa, for joining us to give us a sense of the JSE SA Trade Connect conference.