• Old Mutual will migrate its Zimbabwe secondary listing to the VFEX, ending a six-year trading suspension that began in 2020
• This is the first migration to the VFEX from outside Zimbabwe’s domestic corporate universe, every previous move has been a ZSE-listed Zimbabwean company
• The VFEX overtook the ZSE in total market capitalisation in April 2026 and continues to attract new listings and instrument types

Harare- The Victoria Falls Stock Exchange overtook the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange in total market capitalisation in April 2026, becoming the country's largest exchange by market value just five and a half years after its October 2020 launch, and the pipeline of companies moving toward it has not stopped.

Old Mutual's announcement that it will migrate its Zimbabwe secondary listing from the ZSE to the VFEX, ending a six-year trading suspension that began when government accused the insurer's dual listing of fuelling the Old Mutual Implied Rate, is the most significant single development in Zimbabwe's capital markets since Econet InfraCo listed at a USD 1 billion valuation in March 2026.

It is significant not because it adds another name to the VFEX roster but because of what kind of name it adds. Every migration the VFEX has attracted since its founding has been a ZSE-listed Zimbabwean company relocating from one domestic platform to another.

 Old Mutual is something different, a JSE-primary, pan-African financial group with operations across fourteen African countries, choosing the VFEX as the platform through which its Zimbabwean shareholders will trade, not because it is fleeing ZiG-denominated undervaluation but because the exchange has, in the company's own words, come into its own.

The distinction matters enormously for what the VFEX is becoming. Average turnover per listed company on the VFEX has risen from USD 300,000 in 2021 to USD 7 million in 2025, and the VFEX All Share Index had risen by more than 106% over the twelve months to May 2026, with the exchange then having 19 listed stocks.

Year-to-date in 2026, the VFEX attracted listings including Pfuma REIT, Econet InfraCo, and the FMW Gold ETF, while firms including Avantis Technology, Ndarama, and Green Dollar Stablecoin are targeting the exchange's pipeline. The exchange that began as a specialist USD platform designed primarily to stop Zimbabwean blue chips from going fully offshore is now attracting new instrument categories, new investor types, and now a cross-listed multinational whose arrival signals something the migration wave of domestic companies could not, that the VFEX is capable of attracting listings whose primary motivation is market quality rather than escape from a failing alternative.

Old Mutual's six-year suspension is itself a level whose resolution the VFEX's maturity has made possible. In 2020, government suspended trading in Old Mutual Zimbabwe shares on the ZSE, arguing that the price differential between the company's ZSE and JSE listings was being used to calculate the Old Mutual Implied Rate, at the time a widely used proxy for the parallel exchange rate. Old Mutual itself had no influence on OMIR and was the passive subject of a political decision made about the use of its share price rather than about its business.

The suspension locked Zimbabwean shareholders out of six years of trading, six years of corporate actions, and six years of dividend access that the JSE-listed shareholders of the same company received without interruption. The VFEX's USD-denominated architecture, its offshore financial services centre regulatory framework under Statutory Instruments 62 and 63 of 2026, and its growing institutional investor participation have created the conditions under which the OMIR problem is structurally resolved: a USD-denominated exchange trading Old Mutual shares at prices set in dollars, within a regulated offshore financial framework, removes the currency arbitrage mechanism whose existence the government used in 2020 to justify the suspension.

Securities listed on the VFEX are now subject to a 24-month transition period as Zimbabwe rolls out a new offshore financial regulatory framework through Statutory Instruments 62 and 63 of 2026, bringing the exchange under the ambit of the Victoria Falls International Financial Services Centre as authorities position the platform as a competitive offshore investment hub.

That regulatory repositioning is the structural context within which Old Mutual's board concluded that the VFEX has achieved sufficient scale and liquidity as a viable alternative trading platform.

The exchange is no longer a domestic equity market operating in dollars.

It is being built into an offshore financial centre whose regulatory architecture is designed to be internationally recognisable, and it is that architecture, more than any single listing, that determines whether the VFEX's trajectory continues upward or plateaus once the stock of migratable ZSE companies is exhausted.

However, liquidity remains the exchange's key vulnerability, with May's 81% turnover collapse demonstrating that the VFEX is still a thin market where a single week of low activity can distort the picture. Turnover fell sharply from USD 89.3 million in April to USD 16.8 million in May, reflecting continued reliance on a few large trades and episodic liquidity. Old Mutual's arrival addresses that vulnerability at the margin.

As a pan-African financial group whose shareholders include regional institutional investors across fourteen African markets, it  will bring a buyer and seller base to VFEX that the current domestic-company roster has not yet generated. The depth of that additional liquidity depends on how actively Old Mutual's Zimbabwean and regional institutional shareholders trade once the suspension ends, but the structural contribution of a major cross-listed multinational to a thin market's liquidity profile is positive regardless of the trading volume that materialises in the first weeks.

The ZSE's response to the migration wave has been to lower its minimum listing threshold from USD 10 million to USD 1 million and to relax minimum free-float and shareholder spread requirements, changes designed to attract new listings at the bottom of the market capitalisation range while the top continues departing.

The ZSE has not recorded any meaningful new listing pipeline in 2026 while simultaneously facing continued delistings and migrations, and the asymmetry is the most commercially significant current state of Zimbabwe's capital markets: new listings and new instrument categories go to the VFEX, established listings leave the ZSE, and the ZSE's competitive response addresses the entry threshold for smaller companies without altering the monetary and regulatory architecture that makes the VFEX structurally preferable for every USD-earning company whose valuation the ZiG market systematically understates.

Old Mutual's migration, pending regulatory approval, will restore trading for Zimbabwean shareholders who have been unable to buy, sell, or access dividends on their holdings since 2020.

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