JSE triples software spend in push for digital marketplace - Valdene Reddy — JSE CEO Valdene Reddy

The JSE has sustained a sharply higher rate of software investment into 2026 as it works towards a pan-African digital marketplace by 2031.

The exchange spent R75.5-million acquiring intangible assets in the six months to June, three times the R24.4-million it spent in the same period last year. The step-change came in the second half of 2025, when spending on the same line reached about R80-million, and the JSE has held roughly that pace since.

Total capital expenditure rose more than fourfold to R110-million from R27-million, with full-year guidance maintained at R190-million to R230-million.

The accumulated value of software the exchange has capitalised but not yet brought into use stood at R186-million at 30 June 2026, from R143-million at December and R89-million a year earlier. The projects behind that figure, disclosed in the notes to Tuesday’s interim results, are the modernisation of its Broker Dealer Accounting (BDA) back-office system, what the JSE calls its Sens strategy, the Bond central counterparty system and automation projects named Pentagon and Webstir.

Technology costs rose 4.6% to R246-million — more than a third of the group’s entire non-staff expense base — which the JSE attributed to cloud migration and hosting, infrastructure modernisation and technology support.

Forge 2031 strategy

The exchange is moving BDA off a legacy mainframe in a collaboration with Amazon Web Services, work that also covers cloud-based market data delivery and low-latency edge services.

The spending is a key part of Forge 2031, the strategy group CEO Valdene Reddy is executing around what the exchange calls its “Transform and Grow” pillars, with the stated aim of positioning the JSE as a leading technology-enabled market infrastructure provider for South Africa and the broader African capital markets.

Reddy, who succeeded Leila Fourie on 1 April, told Business Day the exchange has “set an ambition for a digital marketplace by 2031”, describing it as extending beyond crypto trading to tokenisation and the digitisation of settlement processes, and said the intention is to build for South Africa first and then extend those services across the continent.

Read: JSE to get new CEO, with Leila Fourie to retire

The exchange also said early data, automation and AI initiatives are being deployed to improve productivity, scalability and decision-making, and listed maintaining cost discipline while investing in future-state technology, data and AI capabilities among its priorities for the rest of the year.

The JSE has attempted to digitise private markets before.

In November 2020, the exchange announced a transaction with UK fintech Globacap Technology to progress a digital private placements platform and registry services. Globacap, regulated by Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority, used distributed ledger technology to issue and administer private securities, and marketed tokenisation of registered securities as a core capability.

The JSE put £4-million into Globacap in 2021 and a further £0.5-million in 2022. It wrote the investment down to nil in the prior financial year, citing cash flow constraints and regulatory concerns affecting Globacap’s ability to sustain operations and generate future economic benefits.

In Tuesday’s results, the exchange said no new information had emerged to revise that valuation, and that the holding remains on its books at zero because the liquidation of the entity has yet to be finalised. Globacap’s technology platform has separately been absorbed into Apex Group.

The platform that came out of that investment is still running. JSE Private Placement fees for the six months to June were R50 000, against R66 000 a year earlier and R327 000 for the whole of 2025. Equity market fees over the same six months were R368-million.

The JSE was a minority investor in Globacap rather than the operator, and private markets infrastructure has changed considerably since 2020. The interim results do not draw a link between that investment and the digital marketplace now planned for 2031.

Meanwhile, the JSE’s interim headline financials were strong. Operating income rose 14.6% to R1.96-billion, net profit after tax 16.9% to R652-million and headline earnings per share 18.8% to 816.2c. The margin, based on earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation, improved a percentage point to 43.1%.

Priorities

Costs rose 11.5% to R1.21-billion, including R44.5-million of once-off charges from a voluntary separation process run as part of an organisational redesign. That has pushed full-year operating expenditure guidance up to between 6% and 8%, from 5-7%. Stripping out the redesign, the CEO departure and trade-related costs, the JSE put underlying cost growth at 3.5%.

On the infrastructure side, the JSE reported 99.99% market availability with no outages, completed the market’s transition from Jibar to Zaronia, and expanded colocation capacity — a business whose fees grew 24.6% to R32-million and which the exchange describes as supporting a growing proportion of equity market trading. Priorities for the second half include the Bond CCP, the Sens replacement, continued BDA modernisation and MIT hardware replacement.