The fledgling capital market is producing the headline numbers its architects hoped for. In a single week, trading cleared more than one billion Birr in shares for the first time, and the shareholder base is now estimated half a million.

Yet for many of those retail investors, the promise of a traded market still ends at a broker's counter or on a screen waiting for confirmation that never quite arrives.

The Central Securities Depository (CSD) and brokers' back-office systems remain fragmented, causing duplicate registration, manual reconciliation and, in some cases, weeks of waiting before an investor can buy or sell. According to a CSD official, who spoke with Fortune anonymously, the Depository issues securities accounts. It is operated directly by market members, a structure meant to build member-driven infrastructure rather than a fully centralised state utility. But the platform and brokers' back offices are not yet linked.

Investors may be registered first with a broker and then again with the Depository, or vice versa. The officials disclosed that a single-account process is expected "next year", once the systems are integrated. After that, capacity will depend less on the CSD platform than on brokers' technology and staffing.

"The back office system and the CSD aren't integrated," Tilahun Esmael (PhD), chief executive officer of the Ethiopian Securities Exchange (ESX), acknowledged. "The Exchange and brokers are ready to streamline onboarding, but face bottlenecks in broker operations and unfinished vendor work on contracted enhancement features."

Repeated meetings with the CSD are now focused on integration in the coming year, alongside simpler, automated Know Your Customer (KYC) checks. Tilahun argued a mobile user should open an app to a funded trading balance, not a prompt to "open a CSD account". He pointed to Kenya's omnibus and subaccount model, in which client trading proceeds through subaccount transfers without repeated central registration.

The identity layer compounds the problem. According to Seifu Assefa, chief executive officer of Ethio Fidelity, his firm has opened about 4,000 shareholder accounts and can onboard an individual in 25 minutes when staff are available. He acknowledged delays, attributing many of them to coordination gaps and identity data mismatches between the Depository and Fayda, the national ID system and the banking system.

Differences in birth dates, spelling or legacy records migrated from older shareholder registries can trigger "duplicate errors" that brokers cannot settle without the Depository. Seifu warned that delays in posting security deposits can expose sellers to market risk if price windows shift while ownership is still being reconciled. For now, the two platforms stay separate.

The National Bank/CSD project team has yet to deliver enhancements that would enable automatic, real-time account creation and messaging. Brokers, meanwhile, vary widely. Some operate as boutiques serving large clients, while others lack multiple accredited onboarding users or two-factor authentication. During demand spikes, the uneven capacity slows throughput, leaving investors with confirmation of registration but no usable CSD account number. In some cases, waits stretch from two to four weeks, with inconsistent feedback. People familiar with the process say the delays risk undercutting confidence when capital raising begins, and wider ownership is promoted as a way to "put power to the people".

Tilahun has urged wider use of omnibus or subaccount architecture and broader payment-rail partnerships with banks and mobile-money providers.

Seifu cautioned against simply blaming the CSD, insisting each participant "does their part", from accurate data migration by issuers to timely processing by brokers.

Not everyone accepts that multi-week delays are unavoidable.

Abreham Terecha, chief executive of Gadaa Securities and a former Capital Market Project Manager at Gadaa Bank with a decade in banking, attributed the core weakness to a lack of synchronisation between broker back offices and the CSD, but argued that institutional follow-up changes the picture. Investors already registered with issuers such as banks or telecom firms often trigger a "duplicate" error when a new provider tries to open their account, and international protocols leave the correction authority with the CSD.

"Persistent communication can have those errors 'lifted immediately'," he told Fortune. "It doesn't take two weeks or three weeks. If you call and tell them, they will arrange it."