Abojani Investment, a digital first personal finance management company that teaches investors on personal finance and investing in the stock market and money markets held it’s first ever investment summit on Saturday. The event dubbed #InvestIntelligently was held at Ngong Hills Hotel in Nairobi. The main speakers were Paul Mwai, CEO AIB Capital and board member NSE and Reuben Kimani CEO Username Investment Ltd.
The company also celebrated the first anniversary of its WhatsApp investment Masterclass which began in November, 2018. “We champion conversational learning using the principles of adult such as listening, caring and mutual respect on matters personal finance. Abojani aspires to train 1m Kenyans on Financial awareness in 2020.
“We shorten the time between learning and investing or saving by connecting our clients to CMA licensed market players immediately after the classes”, Abojani CEO Mr. Robert Ochieng.
Username investments CEO highlighted 4 key factors that will lead to growth in different segments of real estate in Nairobi and other parts of Kenya. The first one being that Kenya is adding about 1 million people into its population annually and that these people will need shelter or expansion of housing. Rural to urban migration continues to add more people in Nairobi and other cities. Kenya’s population also consists of very many young people. He also highlighted that the 2 million housing deficit will require solutions based on affordable housing. Adding that Investors willing to invest in the real estate sector should look at traffic analysis in lowly priced areas with solid backing showing potential for growth and do due diligence to avoid fraud. Investors should therefore not just invest haphazardly but invest in selected real estate with upside potential return on investment.
Paul Mwai, CEO AIB Capital made a case for investing in the stock market. Asset allocation into various investment asset classes is very important before one decides to invest. Stock market is favored by private sector driven growth rather than public sector driven growth. Mwai acknowledged that low risk free interest rate environment also makes investors seek opportunities in the stock markets and other asset classes rather than investing in government securities.
Paul highlighted what he termed as seven sins of investing in the stock market. Namely, following one’s gut, falling in love with the stock, ignoring fundamentals, following the crowd, getting in and out of the market, being impatient or having a short term outlook and over concentration or over diversification. He caution against getting in and out of the market, “3 weeks can make a big difference in the stock market just like we recently saw with the lifting of the interest rate cap in the banking sector”. Investors should also look at owners of the company and how innovative the company is, companies that deal well with the innovative cycle by replacing saturated products with new ones such as Safaricom Voice replacement by M-PESA and data as the growth drivers are likely to perform well.
In His keynote speech, Reuben Kimani narrated how Username’s first sale came from Facebook. He advised young entrepreneurs to learn to separate career from business. They should prepare well and have an emergency fund of at least 6 months’ worth of monthly expenses before venturing into business from employment. He gave credit to his support system and the power of thinking big that has seen the company grow its annual turnover to over ksh 500m per annum.
Abojani Investment CEO Robert Ochieng mentioned that in Kenya we there is a situation where about 2.5 million working class people are supporting up to 30 million non-working people. The youth should therefore change their mentality from “I need “ to “ I can offer” to find ways of creating value. Abojani has trained over 2000 people on personal finance and investing with 600 of them trained through WhatsApp using bit-sized contents, chats, graphics and PDF documents. “We have inverted micro lending and gaming to come up with micro investing and saving to have as many Kenyans as possible trained on financial awareness”, said Robert.
