Africa's oldest stock exchange is planning its next act. The JSE's new CEO, Valdene Reddy, has laid out "Forge 2031," a five-year plan to turn the 139-year-old exchange into a pan-African digital marketplace, digitising everything from trading and clearing to settlement and adding room for digital assets. "We have set an ambition for a digital marketplace by 2031," Reddy said.
What a digital marketplace actually means
Reddy is careful to say this is bigger than crypto. It is about "providing digital support for any part of the value chain," she said, pointing to tokenisation and digital settlement as examples. The plan is to digitise pieces of what the exchange already does over the next two to three years, prove it in South Africa, then extend those services across the continent. It is a response, she argues, to what is happening in markets globally, a bid not to stagnate. The JSE, established in 1887, is one of the few exchanges whose listed value dwarfs its home economy, with companies and instruments on the bourse topping 20 trillion rand.
Pitching from a position of strength
The strategy lands on the back of a strong first half. Operating cash earnings rose 18.1% to 856 million rand in the six months to June, profit after tax climbed nearly 17% to 652 million rand, and core earnings per share reached 816.2 cents, up from 687 cents a year earlier. Operating income rose 14.6% to 2 billion rand, non-trading income was up 8.1% to 659 million rand, and the exchange ended June sitting on 2.6 billion rand of cash. Reddy pointed to "99.99 percent market availability and zero market outages" as the operational base for the plan. She took over from Leila Fourie in April as the third woman in a row to lead the exchange, and has reorganised the group around "Transform and Grow" pillars.
The pitch is bold; the backdrop is not. The number of companies listed on the JSE has more than halved over two decades, so the real test of Forge 2031 is whether going digital can pull listings and trade back in.
