• The ZSE has signed five institutional partnerships in four months to build ZEEX, an SME-focused platform
• The ZSE’s market capitalisation has fallen more than 70% since 2021 to approximately USD 3.26 billion, with the VFEX now larger at USD 3.54 billion
• Past African SME exchanges have struggled with low-quality listings, weak liquidity, and limited institutional participation

Harare- The Zimbabwe Stock Exchange has spent the better part of 2026 building the institutional architecture of a market that does not yet exist,  five confirmed partnerships in the space of four months, two cohorts of prospective issuers trained, Securities and Exchange Commission of Zimbabwe approval secured, and a digital platform specification that encompasses primary market fundraising, asset tokenisation, and secondary market trading within a single regulated environment.

The compliance and operational frameworks are still being finalised, with a formal launch date to be advised to the market in due course. The Zimbabwe Entrepreneurship Exchange is the most deliberately constructed pre-launch capital market in Zimbabwe's history, and whether that construction converts into actual listings, actual investor participation, and actual capital flowing to Zimbabwe's SME sector is the question whose answer will determine whether ZEEX becomes the ZSE's most significant contribution to Zimbabwe's economic architecture since the exchange's own founding, or the most elaborately documented intention in its recent history.

It is also the most urgently needed. The ZSE that ZEEX is being built to rescue is not the exchange it was five years ago. At the end of 2021 the ZSE's market capitalisation stood at approximately USD 12.19 billion. As of late May 2026 it stood at approximately USD 3.26 billion, compared to the VFEX's USD 3.54 billion, the first time in the history of the two exchanges that the VFEX has overtaken the ZSE in total market capitalisation.

The exchange that was created as a specialist USD platform in 2020 is now larger than the one from which it drew its founding listings, and the migration is still in progress. Econet Wireless Zimbabwe's departure in March 2026, simultaneous with the VFEX listing of Econet InfraCo at a USD 1 billion initial market capitalisation, wiped approximately ZiG 30.5 billion from the exchange and eliminated a company that had accounted for roughly 35% of ZSE total market capitalisation.

TSL shareholders unanimously approved the company's voluntary delisting from the ZSE at an extraordinary general meeting held on 19 June 2026, paving the way for its migration to the VFEX, with trading on the dollar exchange commencing on 30 June. Dairibord Holdings announced plans to voluntarily delist and pursue a VFEX listing in late June 2026, becoming the latest company to seek the benefits of the foreign currency-denominated bourse. First Mutual Properties is in active negotiations over a potential transaction that could result in its own voluntary delisting.

Delta now remains the dominant anchor counter on the ZSE, accounting for approximately 46% of total market capitalisation and often contributing more than 85% of daily turnover, a concentration that makes the exchange's health hostage to a single counter in a way no functioning capital market should be.

The economic rationale behind the migrations is commercially understandable and structurally reinforcing. The VFEX offers lower trading costs of approximately 2.32% compared to 4.15% on the ZSE, zero capital gains tax on disposals, lower withholding tax on foreign investor dividends, and more liberalised exchange control conditions around dividend and capital repatriation.

 Institutional capital continues migrating toward US dollar-denominated assets, export-oriented businesses, and hard currency earnings streams, a shift that accelerated materially following Econet's departure.

The ZSE and the VFEX have since eased migration rules, removing several regulatory hurdles and in certain cases exempting companies from publishing full listing documentation or undergoing a formal shareholder-approved delisting process, a structural concession that acknowledges the migration's momentum rather than slowing it.

The ZSE has not recorded any meaningful new listing pipeline in 2026 while simultaneously facing continued delistings and migrations, and by December 2025 its market capitalisation stood at roughly USD 3.49 billion, more than 70% below its 2021 peak, with a 3.5-fold expansion required to restore what has been lost.

It is against that backdrop, a 132-year-old exchange that has shed more than 70% of its 2021 market capitalisation and whose most consequential remaining counter is a single beverages company that ZEEX must be understood.

ZSE Holdings chief executive Justin Bgoni, entering 2026, described the company as positioned at a pivotal juncture of growth and modernisation, with the introduction of a dedicated platform aimed at formalising the informal sector and improving SME access to mainstream capital markets as central to the exchange's outlook. That framing clarifies the stakes: ZEEX's success is not merely about Zimbabwe's 204,000-plus SMEs gaining capital market access, but it is about the ZSE Holdings Group maintaining commercial relevance as an exchange operator in a landscape the VFEX's growing market capitalisation has fundamentally altered.

The scale of the market ZEEX is designed to serve defines what is at stake on the other side of that question. Zimbabwe had approximately 204,798 operational establishments as of June 2025 according to ZimStat, with more than three-quarters operating informally. Those 150,000-plus informal establishments are the most undercapitalised productive sector in the economy, businesses whose owners have demonstrated commercial viability through survival and growth without formal capital, and whose expansion is constrained not by the absence of viable models but by the absence of a financing pathway that connects their track record to patient, priced, regulated capital.

ZEEX's strategic premise rests entirely on whether a sufficient number of those businesses can be formalised, governed, and prepared for public market participation within a timeline that generates a first listing cohort of sufficient quality to attract sustained institutional interest.

ZEEX is structurally different from both the ZSE main board and the VFEX not merely in scale requirements but in design philosophy. The ZSE main board and VFEX were built for established companies with audited financial histories, existing shareholder registers, and USD revenues sufficient to justify compliance costs. ZEEX is being designed for the company that has none of those things yet but could have them if it had access to the governed capital formation process that public market participation provides.

That distinction is the entire point of the platform, and whether it holds in practice when listing rules are finalised and the first issuers are assessed is the test no MOU can answer in advance.

The five institutional partnerships the ZSE has signed address each of the failure modes that have ended SME exchange initiatives across Africa rather than leaving a single partner to cover all dimensions of the supply and demand problem. The Small and Medium Enterprise Development Corporation addresses the supply side at the grassroots level, reaching into the informal enterprise sector upstream of every other partner, since many SMEs fail to access financing not because viable opportunities are absent but because the businesses lack audited financials and governance structures that meet any investor threshold.

Red Sphere Microfinance, a CBZ Holdings subsidiary, will establish a technology-driven trade receivables discounting platform under ZEEX, enabling suppliers to convert unpaid invoices into immediate cash through a regulated digital marketplace, addressing the acute cash flow constraint on SMEs approaching formalisation without requiring them to be listing-ready from the outset.

INVESCI Asset Management, whose partnership was formalised in June 2026, brings structured institutional capital whose screening discipline provides the demand-side assurance that retail-investor-only SME markets have consistently failed to sustain, with INVESCI managing director Thomas Chataika describing ZEEX as a platform that would lead to more efficient discovery of investment opportunities and allocation of capital.

TN Asset Management, whose MOU was signed on 30 June 2026, commits to identifying, screening, and co-financing high-growth startups and SMEs with the potential to list, collaborating on corporate governance and financial reporting training, and exploring financing instruments including SME bonds and sustainability-linked products, with its SEC Zimbabwe licence and membership of the Association of Investment Managers Zimbabwe giving its screening function regulatory credibility that the exchange's own promotional interest in filling its pipeline cannot provide.

The National Venture Capital Company of Zimbabwe, whose MOU was also signed in June 2026, creates a structured connection between Zimbabwe's early-stage venture capital ecosystem and the capital markets, with NVCCZ chief executive Tinotenda Kambasha describing ZEEX as providing venture investments with a strategic exit route that strengthens investor participation, value realisation, improved liquidity, and recycling of capital into the next generation of high-impact Zimbabwean businesses.

The five together constitute a capital market ecosystem rather than a listing venue. SMEDCO generates the raw enterprise pipeline from the informal sector, while Red Sphere provides immediate liquidity to cash-constrained SMEs approaching formalisation. INVESCI and TNAM provide the institutional screening, structuring, and capital that converts promising businesses into investment-ready issuers. NVCCZ creates the venture capital-to-public-market graduation pathway that recycles institutional capital from successful exits back into early-stage enterprise investment. If all five function as designed, ZEEX's first listing cohort will have been pre-screened by licensed investment managers, pre-financed through blended structures, and pre-trained through the ZSE's own issuer programme before a single share or token is offered to the public.

The issuer training programme is the pre-launch signal most grounded in confirmed activity rather than institutional intent. Building on a 2024 inaugural cohort, the ZSE launched a second Prospective Issuers Training Programme in 2025 featuring over 35 high-potential businesses drawn from across Zimbabwe's key economic sectors, with many participants having formally expressed interest in using ZEEX to raise capital and access secondary market liquidity.

Two consecutive annual cohorts with confirmed listing interest from graduates is the most credible supply-side evidence the pre-launch phase has produced, because unlike the MOUs, the training programme has already produced businesses that have self-selected into the preparation process. The 35-plus businesses from the 2025 cohort are the pipeline whose readiness for formal listing examination will determine whether ZEEX's first operating year produces the issuer quality that investor confidence requires.

Africa's SME exchange history tells Zimbabwe clearly what happens when that quality is absent. The Nairobi Securities Exchange's Growth Enterprise Market Segment, launched in 2013 to provide capital access for Kenyan SMEs, attracted only a handful of listings over its first decade despite Kenya's sophisticated financial infrastructure and deep institutional investor base, primarily because the exchange approved a market without building the pre-listing preparation ecosystem that investor-ready companies require. The JSE's AltX in South Africa achieved early listing success but experienced persistent delistings as newly public companies discovered that quarterly reporting, continuous disclosure, audit obligations, and investor relations exceeded the management capacity of businesses that had been formalised for listing rather than genuinely prepared for it.

ZEEX's partnership architecture is a direct response to both failure modes, the issuer training addressing the investor-readiness gap that left GEMS without quality supply, and the TNAM, INVESCI, and NVCCZ screening frameworks addressing the governance sustainability gap that produced AltX delistings. Ghana's Growth and Sustainability Market, launched by the Ghana Stock Exchange in 2013, provides the most applicable positive precedent, having sustained listings by combining rigorous issuer preparation with dedicated market maker obligations that prevent the liquidity vacuum that kills secondary market trading in small-capitalisation securities.

If ZEEX does not include a liquidity provision mechanism for secondary market share trading, the secondary market risks the same thin trading and price discovery failure that has made GEMS listed securities commercially unattractive to institutional investors.

The digital infrastructure dimension of ZEEX's design introduces a technical regulatory layer whose finalisation is not mechanical. The commercial urgency of launching before partnership momentum dissipates is the risk that compliance finalisation creates: each of the five institutional MOUs has been described by its signatories as an intent to be implemented as ZEEX becomes operational, and every month of pre-launch delay is a month in which those partners' attention, capital, and management focus are directed to their existing business activities rather than to the ZEEX pipeline development that requires the platform to exist before its full commercial logic can be activated.

Therefore,  standard observation about institutional pre-launch coalitions applies here: the coalition that is enthusiastic about a platform before it launches is a different coalition from the one that actually does the work after it does.

ZEEX's outlook across the second half of 2026 depends on three variables the partnership announcements have not resolved. The first is the compliance framework completion timeline, which determines when the platform can legally begin live operations. The second is issuer pipeline quality, whether the 35-plus businesses from the 2025 training cohort and the SMEs identified through institutional screening are genuinely investment-ready or merely listing-interested, a distinction whose commercial significance is the difference between a first cohort that builds institutional confidence and one whose early listings damage it.

The third is investor participation depth, whether domestic pension funds participate in ZEEX's primary offerings at a level that provides genuine price discovery or whether early trading is thin, illiquid, and retail-driven, a risk the VFEX itself has not fully escaped, with FBC Securities noting in its May 2026 market report that liquidity remains the dominant exchange's key vulnerability, with May's 81% turnover collapse demonstrating that even Zimbabwe's leading institutional market is still thin enough for a single week of low activity to distort the picture.

A platform launching into that environment without a dedicated secondary market liquidity mechanism faces a structural challenge the partnership architecture has not yet addressed.

The real test will begin only after ZEEX is officially launched, and its measure of success will not be the number of memoranda of understanding signed but whether the initiative generates investment-ready businesses, attracts investor participation, and creates sufficient liquidity to sustain a viable market. What ZEEX does not yet have is the proof of concept that only a live market provides: an issuer that has raised real capital from real investors at a price reflecting genuine demand, traded on a secondary market with sufficient activity to give that price ongoing relevance, and reported its first post-listing results to investors who can hold it accountable.

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