Ipahco
The register reads like a menu, and the first question most people ask of it is which one pays best. Most of them do not pay anything. A stockbroker is a door you go through, a trustee is a safeguard you never meet, and the Nairobi Securities Exchange is the floor the rest of it stands on — none of these has a yield, and comparing them as though they did is how people end up in the wrong place entirely.
So the grouping below is by what a licence actually does for you, not by the order the regulator lists them in. Two of the four destinations are closed to the public unless you work somewhere specific, which the pages say plainly rather than leaving you to find out.
A destination. You buy in, you hold something, and there is a return to measure.
Unit trusts. Money market funds live here, and this is where most Kenyans saving outside a bank actually are.
Property, owned in units you can sell. Six are authorised; five of them have a ticker you can look up today.
Shares in your employer, on terms the public does not get — and only if you work there.
Money into private companies long before anyone can buy their shares. One licensee.
Someone who decides, or advises on, what your money buys. The return belongs to what they bought; the thing to compare is the fee and the mandate.
The firms behind the unit trusts. The largest category on the register.
Licensed to run a REIT: buy the buildings, let them, decide what gets distributed.
Licensed to tell you what to buy. Ipahco is not one of these.
Licensed to trade currencies in your account, on your behalf.
A door. You open an account, place an order, and pay a fee. What you earn depends on what you bought, not on which door you used — so these compare on cost, not on yield.
How a share order actually reaches the NSE. You need one to buy anything listed.
A broker licence plus the corporate side — listings, rights issues, advisory.
Where bonds are actually traded — largely over the counter, largely by banks.
The licence behind investing from your phone. Safaricom and Airtel Money hold it.
Futures on the NSE derivatives board. Leverage, and losses that are not capped at your deposit.
A forex broker that takes the other side of your trade itself.
A forex broker that passes your order out to the market instead of taking it on.
Licensed to sell coffee at the Nairobi Coffee Exchange, on behalf of growers.
A licence that exists so that somebody independent is holding or watching the assets. You rarely choose one and never pay one directly — but its presence is why a scheme is safe to use at all.
The exchange, the depository and the firms that rate credit. Nobody invests in these; everything else on this page runs on top of them.