Good morning and good afternoon, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm very pleased to introduce Carmini Kander, my colleague and CFO, who will be joining us. Welcome to the first half of 2022 results for our interims. I will be doing a bit of an introduction, providing some of the salient points, followed by Carmini Kander, who will take you through the financials. Then I'll wrap up with a couple of points around our strategic direction and our focus for the future. We'll then open the floor for Q&A. Great. So I'll dive straight in.
As you would have seen from the SENS announcement, we posted strong results for our first half of the year, underpinned by a growth in revenue of 10%, very contained cost growth to below inflation at 3%, and this culminated in an EBITDA increased by 20%. Our EBITDA margin increased from 42%-45%, and that resulted in headline earnings per share of 542, and that was up by 29%. Of course, this is always underpinned by the salient feature of the JSE, which is very high cash generation. We are particularly pleased to report that our investment into Link Market Services, which is now called JSE Investor Services or JIS, has produced above average and promising results.
Our launch of the private placements market has gotten off to a very good start, and I'll talk a little bit more about that later in the presentation. Of course, as always, an important and salient factor of the JSE is our operational resilience. Throughout the pandemic, we demonstrated that the investment in technology has stood us in good stead, and this first half of the year has been no different. We're very comfortable with the level of resilience in our technology systems. If I shift now to our revenue, you'll see that the capital markets increased by 9%. Of course, that covers primary and secondary markets across all of our asset classes. Our post-trade services increased by 8%, and that's affected by both volume and value.
Our average daily volume traded was up by 17%, and our number of deals was up by 4%. The lower half of this slide really demonstrates that the commitment that we made to our strategy in diversifying our revenue, in ensuring growth in those acquisitions, and ensuring that we're growing non-cyclical and annuity revenue has come to the fore. Our JSE Investor Services has increased by 46%, and Information Services has increased by 15%, largely underpinned by a combination of organic growth in the Information Services business, together with a positive FX impact. Right. If I break the performance down a little bit further, this gives you a bit more detail across all of the markets.
Of course, as I mentioned, our equity capital markets is up by 9%, and really driven by the billable average daily value traded. That was up, as I said, by 17% off the back of a high and hyper volatile period. Although higher than prior year, not higher than our very volatile pandemic year. The trading activity was largely supported by a combination of central order book trading, which was up by 5%, and our complex order suite, which was up by 53%. We also witnessed an increase in foreign trading, inbound trading, largely in the months of March and April. We've seen pleasing growth in the colocation trading.
We're trading through our colocation venue has increased from 53%- 65%, so that continues to be an area of focus. Moving now to our equity derivatives business. That revenue was up 13%. That really, again, is off the back of a higher value traded, which was up in the equity derivatives market by 21% to ZAR 3.4 trillion. That was driven off a combination of an increase in hedging activity, new client participation, and liquidity in our underlying futures. If I move to the next area, which is the primary market area. Our IPOs increased by 4%, and we are encouraged by the pipeline that we see. Of course, this is moderated and will be determined by macroeconomic uncertainty. We have seen an increase in the capital raise.
Our overall market cap of all listed entities on the cash equity market has increased year-on-year from last June to this June, end of June, by 7%. We've also seen 394 new bond listings with a nominal value of ZAR 4.1 trillion. We've seen very positive listings and growth in the sustainability segment, which has increased to 43 new listings. Now, if you look at the next line, which is bonds and financial derivatives, of course, that covers a host of different markets. I've spoken to the equity derivatives market, but the interest rate market revenue was up 6%, and that was off the back of a 12% increase in bond nominal value.
This growth is largely attributable to global uncertainty, as well as interest rates within the South African market on a relative basis, presenting favorably. We have also seen foreign bond inflows into our market, and I'll talk a little bit more about that later. Moving to the currency derivatives market, which we have seen contracting over a couple of years now. That revenue's up 12% and, largely, as a result of number of contracts traded, which are up 13% to 22 million, and very much off the back of rand volatility, and especially in the months of April and May. This led to an increase in hedging in that market.
The commodity market was up by 5%, and the number of contracts which support that revenue line was up by 2% to 1.8 million. The heightened trading activity that we saw was really largely in the month of June, as a result of rolling contracts because of late rains which delayed the planting season. Now moving on to the post-trade services area. That market overall is up 8%. Clearing and settlement revenue, which is really driven off value traded, was up by 10%, and our BDA revenue was up by 4%. The information services market was up by 15%. As I've said earlier, owing to organic growth plus positive effects from the FX market.
Of course, you may remember that more than 60% of our information services revenue is billed in U.S. dollars, which provides a very important and valuable hedge, particularly in defraying our vendor costs, which are typically in U.S. dollars. The information services is an important area and growth node strategically for the organization. You would have seen that we launched our new trade analytics platform, which is called Trade Explorer. That was in partnership with Big XYT. We'll be enabling market analytics and market ranking services for the brokers. The trial access will start next quarter, and we're looking forward to engaging the market on that. Of course, an enormous project which is well established in the cloud data services involves the development of a data lake in next-generation technology.
We'll be delivering parts of that later this year. Moving on to market performance. If you have a look at the top left-hand graph, you'll see that as at the end of June or as at the end of July, actually, the All Share Index outperformed all of the other key benchmark indices. The JSE at that point, at the end of July, closed down 6.5%. When we compare that to the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, that was down 27%, and the MSCI World Index was down 15%. The JSE's undervaluation and various other factors playing into a reasonably positive performance on a relative basis.
Of course, the next graph indicates our foreign flows, equity market in blue and bond market in green. Notable, as you do the eyeball test, is that the shift in the extreme extremity of those numbers is narrowing. We're seeing a slight moderation from the extreme outflows that we saw over the last two years in the cash equity market. In the cash equity market, we saw a tale of two quarters. The first quarter, we saw positive flows into the country off the back of the exit of Russia from the MSCI Emerging Markets Index. However, in the second quarter of the first half, we saw that reversing off the back of uncertainty relating to interest rate hikes and the possibility of a recession.
Pleasingly, we have seen the bond market delivering positive inflows of ZAR 14 billion year- to- date. Now, this bottom graph indicates a combination of factors. You can see the volatility index for South Africa increasing over the last couple of years off the back of the trio of events, the pandemic, China's lockdown, and of course, most recently, the inflation crisis that many of the developed world countries are facing into and reflecting through into developing world markets. Of course, you would see that our volume and value traded follow that. While the external market dynamics are an important element for us, at the JSE, we are focusing on our strategic initiatives that support value creation, and so we are focusing on the controllable items.
I'm going to hand over to Carmini, who will take you through the financials.
Thank you, Leila, and good afternoon to all. I'm going to begin with key financial highlights, starting with profitability. Operating income was up 10% year-on-year. As Leila has mentioned, this was driven by growth across all of our segments. Revenue growth is therefore a combination of, increased market activity as well as higher contributions from JIS and Information Services. Total operating costs are 3% year-on-year and very well contained. As you know, inflation has been trending up for the last few months, but that has not flowed into this set of results. EBITDA up 20% year-on-year. EBITDA is a key metric with regard to our operating performance. We have also seen a widening of EBITDA margin up to 45%, which is 3% points up from last year. Moving on to net finance income up 30%.
This is largely a function of increased yields on JSE's own funds. That was up on average 90 basis points year-on-year, as well as increase in JSE Clear margin deposits, which were up on average 20% year-on-year. The strong operating performance, supported by growth in net finance income, has translated into a 29% increase in both headline earnings per share as well as earnings per share. Moving on to cash and capital. As you are aware, strong cash generation is a key feature of the JSE's business model. This half year was no different. We generated ZAR 534 million from cash in operations versus ZAR 472 million in the previous year. From a CapEx perspective, we spent ZAR 51 million, largely on operational resilience.
Regulatory capital, we did share our regulatory capital with you at the end of last year, and we continue to disclose that and have unpacked that further later on. Regulatory capital is ZAR 1.2 billion in the form of equity for JSE Limited as well as JSE Clear, and this is supported by cash of ZAR 795 million. That is included in our cash exit balance of ZAR 2 billion, which is largely stable year-on-year. I will now move on to the income statement and call out certain elements that I have not already discussed. Total revenue up 11%, which is slightly stronger than our growth in operating revenue. This is largely due to positive Forex movements on other income. The share of profit from associate, that is the JSE share of Strate earnings.
The JSE holds approximately 45% of Strate, and the portion was ZAR 27 million for this half year, which is up 2% year-on-year. This performance is not expected to be mirrored in the second half as Strate ramps up spend for growth initiatives. From a net profit perspective, 447 million for this period, which is up 28% year-on-year. Minority shareholders reflected at 0 for this period, bearing in mind that, JSE Limited now wholly owns JIS. I'm now going to move into our operating expenses. As mentioned earlier, well contained at 3% up year-on-year. I'll start with personnel cost growth and look at the different components. From a growth remuneration perspective, we had annual salary increases as well as the first time inclusion of share plan services.
This is supported by annuity revenue within JIS. We did have some offsetting impact in personnel expenses, and that was approximately ZAR 10 million of forfeitures from the long-term incentive scheme. Technology costs down 3% year-on-year. Factors influencing that were the non-recurring costs for the mainframe project in the previous year, as well as lower net contractor costs in the current year due to increased levels of capitalization. These factors helped to offset the inflationary increase impacts in the technology cost base, as well as some new costs for our growth initiatives, being JSE Private Placements as well as JIS. Depreciation and amortization down 5% year-on-year. That's largely due to the fully depreciated components of the ITaC project, as well as T+3.
Since we have invested in certain licenses at the end of the first half and going into the second half, we do expect depreciation and amortization to begin increasing in the second half of the year. From a general expense perspective, we are up 11% to a total spend of ZAR 282 million. What is important in terms of general expenses is that, the largest component of costs are Strate ad valorem, which is a cost with an equal amount of revenue. It's a pass-through cost as well as regulatory levies. The combination of these two, account for almost just over ZAR 100 million, included in the ZAR 282 million.
From a growth perspective with NG, which in general expenses, we did have some variable costs for JIS, as well as costs incurred for strategy development for the group and new initiatives, including in the information services space, as well as retail development. Moving on to CapEx. As I have mentioned, we spent ZAR 51 million for CapEx in the first half of the year. That was dominated by maintenance of the business. Around 90% of spend went to that bucket. With rejuvenation of infrastructure, we have spent mainly on refreshing our networks and from a systems perspective, largely in the regulatory space on the SENS and Webster systems. We're also focusing on migrating the bond valuation system. From a growth perspective, we have focused on securities collateral. We've spent ZAR 6 million on that in the first half of the year.
That will allow JSE Clear to take securities collateral in addition to cash collateral, which is currently the situation. We do believe that that will be positive for the market and should help liquidity going forward. From a full year perspective, we have refreshed our guidance. We expect to spend between ZAR 110 million to ZAR 130 million for the full year. That is a revision from the previous guidance of ZAR 140 million-ZAR 180 million. Now, this change was necessitated by us working through different business cases, revising estimates, as well as considering accounting treatment on different projects. In the second half of the year, we're going to move forward with migrating market data into the cloud from an equities data perspective for information services, as Leila has mentioned earlier.
We also expect to deliver on the securities collateral project. Also, in half two, we are going to be upgrading our clearing and settlement technology for those asset classes that were not migrated during the ITaC project. With that, we expect to spend not only CapEx, but also operational costs that will come through in technology costs. I will now move over to cash generation. As I did mention, we generated ZAR 534 million in cash for this half year. When we look at our net profit in our income statement, that was ZAR 447 million. Now, the reason for the lower net profit versus cash generated from operations is largely the non-cash components that are within the income statement. That is largely depreciation and amortization.
Stripping those components out of our income statement, the actual cash component of profit is ZAR 535 million. This means that we have realized 100% of our earnings in this period in cash. From an investing activities perspective, I've already mentioned CapEx as well as the new renewal of certain licenses. In addition, we also spent about ZAR 10 million on bridging finance to Globacap. As you would recall, the JSE owns a minority share in Globacap that we purchased last year. That bridging finance is convertible to equity in the future. Moving on to our cash balance and unpacking this in more detail for you.
We did think that it is necessary to provide this detail so that there is an understanding of almost the base level of capital required to operate in our markets versus what we consider the flexible element of cash that allows for different kinds of capital allocation, which I will talk to in a minute. What is important is from our ZAR 2 billion in cash on the balance sheet, approximately ZAR 1.2 billion or 60% has been ring-fenced and is not distributable. Understanding that a bit deeper, that is a combination of largely investor protection and other funds, as well as regulatory capital. From an investor relations investor protection funds perspective, we hold funds for market investor protection within the cash equities market, the bonds market, as well as the derivatives market.
We also have on our balance sheet the JSE Empowerment Fund, which funds tertiary education for disadvantaged students in specific fields of study within the country. Moving on to regulatory capital, that is for JSE Limited as an exchange and JSE Clear as a CCP, per the Financial Markets Act. Regulatory capital is largely six months of cash OpEx for JSE Limited. For JSE Clear, nominally a lot smaller than JSE Limited, however, more capital intensive relative to its size, and I will talk to that shortly. The remaining cash balance of ZAR 814 million that you would see on the slide is then actually available for other forms of capital allocations, so reinvestment into the business in the form of CapEx. We've also retained some cash in previous years for inorganic deals.
This portion of the cash bucket also funds dividends. At this stage, we continue to guide on growth in the ordinary dividend to the extent that the final results do support that. We also fund increased regulatory requirements, capital requirements out of this bucket, and that is an important aspect that I'm going to be covering shortly. The last financial slide is on expectations for 2022, largely relating to costs as well as cash. From an OpEx perspective, we expect an annual cost increase of between 4%-7%, and this is driven by some timing differences. Costs moving, not spent in half one coming into half two, as well as certain planned initiatives, including the upgrade of the trading and clearing and settlement systems.
From an interest income perspective, the group has taken a decision to start investing some of JSE Limited's regulatory capital into government bonds. The quantum and the timing of that will depend on market conditions, including a monetary policy action. CapEx, I've already spoken to that. From an independent clearing house perspective, JSE Clear is currently an associated clearing house. Leila has mentioned the move to an independent clearing house, and with that will come higher capital requirements, regulatory capital requirements. That's largely a function of a changing income statement structure as well as balance sheet structure. The combination of that will then require JSE Limited to inject capital into JSE Clear, and we are planning to inject ZAR 115 million in half year two. That brings me to the end of the financial section of the presentation, and I look forward to your questions.
Thank you very much.
Thank you so much, Carmini. Before we move to Q&A, I'm going to just walk you through a couple of slides to give you a sense of our strategic delivery and points to consider in looking ahead. You would probably all be familiar with the four pillars of our strategy. Centrally growing sustained high quality earnings, underpinned and supported by protecting and growing the core by transforming our business, and then finally, by building a sustainable business. Within the outside pillars, these are all, of course, underpinned by a focus on our customers and ensuring strong, motivated, and capable staff. The first point that we've raised is our introduction of transition and sustainability bonds. I did mention earlier that we've doubled the number of social bonds in response to market demand.
These sustainability and transition bonds are designed for companies that are looking to switch from a carbon-intensive environment. Perhaps it might be the decommissioning of a coal plant, for example. We are seeing keen interest by market participants. Secondly, a number of important products have been launched or are in the process of launching in the unit trust space. This would be so-called listings in the unit trust sphere. We launched earlier this year Actively Managed Certificates, and we've had tremendous interest from the market around the launch or the possible launch of actively managed funds and ETFs. We've done all we can to get that launched, and we're waiting for the Financial Sector Conduct Authority to make the final approval.
And as soon as that happens, we'll launch to the market. Of course, on the competitive front, our pricing, our resilience, our deep and well-capitalized infrastructure, together with the interconnected nature of the business across the global market, has ensured that we are able to remain competitive. In fact, we've slightly uplifted our market share from the beginning of the year, and we now process 99.7% of trades through the South African market. You would be aware of our listing reforms, and that really relates to the changes in listings that were introduced a couple of months ago as a result of the cutting red tape initiative. Moving on to the transformation side.
The private placements market, which launched in March, has delivered 11 issuances to date and ZAR 10 billion in invest capital. This is in the debt and the equity space, and we are focused on the SME and the infrastructure market. We believe this is a growth mode for the country and will also be an important counterbalancing factor in the contraction of the small and mid-cap listings market and in enabling the growth mode of the country. I talked a little bit about the launch of the JSE Trade Explorer, and this is a first for an exchange to provide such a service. We expect that this will be the foundation for many other new and continued products over our next five-year information services growth trajectory.
I'm going to speak a little bit more to the JIS market, but before I do that, I just want to mention our SME focus. Our SME ecosystem that we're building out really is supportive of the private placements market. We launched our first formal cohort this year after piloting last year, and this is aligned to an incubator, which we are in the process of launching together with important market participants and government institutions. The final area, which is the sustainability market. You would have seen that we published our sustainability and climate disclosure guidance. Importantly, these documents align to international precedent, but they reflect the local dynamics of our economy and of our social structure.
These documents are not only important for listed entities, but equally important for those investors who are wanting to ensure a sustainability mandate. This, we've seen globally, is the fastest-growing asset class in financial markets. Then finally, you would all be aware of the sweeping changes that we published in our recent consultation paper on listings reform, from dual class shares to plain languaging to technology board, et cetera. That consultation process closed a couple of weeks ago, and the issuer regulation team will be announcing the areas of focus in the short term and a plan of action and a response to the tremendous support and the tremendous number of comments that we've got on that very important paper.
I said that I would talk a little bit more about our JSE Investor Services. As I mentioned earlier, we grew revenue by 46%, and this was really enabled by a combination of factors. We've increased market share since our acquisition in November of 2020 from 20% to 27%. That's really a function of 14 new organic client wins and a combination of an expanded service offering through our deal with Investec to acquire the Investec Share Plan Services. This brought on 90 new clients and much more common clients. The launch of the JSE's ShareHub communication portal represents the first step in what we promised to the market would be a sweeping transformation in this industry.
This ShareHub allows issuers to communicate directly to their shareholders without having to incur the expenses and the admin of snail mail, effectively. We have almost 500 million shareholders registered on that portal, and we've already uploaded in the short space of time that this system's been live almost 1 million documents. This is a very important demonstration of our responsiveness to the market to cut red tape, to reduce the administrative and manual processes, and thereby reduce costs for our market. As we look ahead in this market, and I'm deeply involved in the sales process and also in supporting this business, we have a strong pipeline for the second half of the year of potential new clients.
We are also planning to launch our BEE verification environment. We continue to automate processes and are looking at the underlying technology and potentially introducing next-generation technology underpinned by a distributed ledger, which will completely reduce the intermediation and the amount of communication that goes on between shareholders and their issuers. I suppose in concluding I really just wanted to say that we are pleased with the positive set of results. They have been supported by a combination of favorable market conditions, operational resilience, and positive and increasing contributions by our acquisition investments. At the same time adhering to and supporting our sustainability commitment and the growth of that sustainability market. Thank you so much for your time. We'll now open for questions.
If you can please type your questions into the chat box, Romy will call them out.
Thank you, Leila. We have a couple questions in the chat box already. I'll start with the first one from Brian Thomas. He asked, well, he says, "Thanks for a good presentation, also a decent set of results. Your OpEx control was exceptional in a tough inflation environment. Do you see this OpEx control as sustainable into H2?"
Do you wanna take that one?
Yes. Thank you for the question. A large portion of our cost base has already baked in annual pricing increases. When you look at personnel, that is done earlier in the year. With regard to our technology costs, we do not have a significant amount of new contracts or contracts renewing in the second half. From that perspective, we think that in this financial year, inflation has already largely been taken care of. Clearly, the outcome for next year does become a little more challenging, but for this year, we're quite comfortable.
Thank you. We have another question from Howard [Lurie]. He stated, "Instead of investing cash in government bonds, has the board considered a share buyback to improve the share price, which should be at least 15 PE?" He stated, "Sweeping up shares in JSE will give JSE cash a similar return to bonds," is the one question. He has stated, "Listed companies are buying back, e.g., Naspers and Prosus and others, will boost JSE rating with just ZAR 1 million in share buybacks." The last comment, "Great results. Thank you.
Thank you, Howard. I hope all is well, and thanks for your question and for your comments. Howard, we have chatted quite some, you know, for quite some time about share buybacks. Of course, our regulatory capital is we are limited in terms of what we can invest in. We had to request permission by the Prudential Authority to, in fact, even invest in government bonds. We're not permitted to invest our regulatory capital into equity, so government bonds is really purely a yield enhancer for our regulatory capital. As you would have seen from the slide that Carmini put up, the amount of available capital for distribution after CapEx, dividends, and the inorganic acquisition is limited. We, of course, are open to share buybacks.
We are considering our share buyback strategy actively, and if the share price ends up at a position which we feel is favorable, then we certainly would consider that. It's also, of course, all in the context of the amount of capital that's available. Thanks so much for your question.
Leila, can you give us a little bit more color on the securities collateral project?
Sure. The securities collateral project was dependent on two things, technology changes and legislative changes in the Insolvency Act. Those legislative changes came through a few months ago, and the teams are now all working on enabling our ability to accept non-cash collateral in the form of government bonds. Now, our collateral, our margin placements are above ZAR 60 billion, as you would be aware and have seen in our financials. We expect that it could. You know, we could see up to ZAR 20 billion being posted in non-cash collateral. That will, of course, potentially have a liquidity enhancing factor.
In terms of pricing, the JSE will be charging a service fee, and so we don't expect it will affect our revenue, but certainly will be favorable, particularly in trying to shift some of the OTC market onto the exchange in terms of cost of funds that traders would have to, you know, absorb when they're posting cash collateral for exchange traded deals.
Leila, we have two more questions from Brian Thomas in the chat. Firstly, has your initiative in the East to attract investors had any impact as yet? That's the first one. The second one is, you mentioned a promising IPO pipeline. Can you elaborate on that pipeline? It's my understanding that the large one, Coca-Cola Beverages Africa, has been postponed.
Great. Thanks, Brian. Of course, the work that we're doing in Southeast Asia is ongoing, and we've got a long line of vision on that. There are three, sort of, well, two areas of focus that we're channeling in the information services space. The first is in having put a point of presence down where we are piping data through the Shanghai Stock Exchange, South Africa listed and trading data. Then the second is engaging large distributors like Bloomberg and Reuters in providing our data for free for a three, six, 12 month, depending on the nature of the contract period. We have been planning to follow that up with a roadshow, which was obviously constrained by the COVID lockdown in Southeast Asia.
We do have a roadshow planned. There are other elements to this. Information services in and of itself cannot grow the market. It's just simply an awareness creator. We have followed up with a number of digital and virtual conferences to crowd in liquidity providers and new clients, and some of those have been successful, and we have seen an inflow of new clients. Of course, dual listings is another area of focus. Now, you would have seen that we signed an MOU with the Singapore Exchange, which means that listed entities on Singapore don't have to comply with our listings requirements if they're secondary list. There is one company in the pipeline contemplating listing.
We really do need to expand that with an investor roadshow, and that is planned within the next couple of months. Brian, moving to your next question around the listings pipeline. Of course, this pipeline is very much affected by what's going on in the global markets and the uncertainty that might be created. We obviously also have a number of factors and dynamics in our local context. In the public domain, you would be aware of Coca-Cola Beverages Africa, which is planning, at this point, the public domain seems to indicate, a 2023 listing. Fidelity Services Group, which is a new listing, is in the pipeline. OUTsurance, which is an unbundling, is to be confirmed.
African Bank, probably only in the next couple of years. Sedibelo Resources Limited was an inward listing on the JSE. Bushveld Minerals is also a new inward listing. The empowerment segment would gain a new listing through Old Mutual Bula Tsela. The Barloworld unbundling is planned for quarter three this year. Yeah. Premier Group also to be confirmed, and that's a BEE exit. Of course, Big Tree Copper. There are a number of companies in the pipeline, but of course, the current market conditions are pretty important to consider. Thanks, Brian.
We have another question in the chat from Richard Hassan. He said, "Well done on a good set of results. Will you have to mark-to-market your holdings in government bonds every six months, as this may cause some earnings volatility if you do?
Okay. Thank you, Richard. Our portfolio of government bonds is an investment portfolio and not a trading portfolio. As such, the fair value movements, although we would do that, almost, I think, on a daily basis, that will not impact earnings, so it will go through equity. The way in which we will manage the portfolio, though, is look at a combination of returns through the income statement as well as the balance sheet. The only time that you will actually see movements through the income statement on fair value adjustments is on the realization of that bond portfolio, so in the case of either maturity or sale.
One closing question on JSE Private Placements. Can you provide an update on the initiatives planned within the private platform now that the license has been obtained?
Great. Thanks for that, Romy. Really the private placements is in its embryonic state. It's only been sort of five to six months in the making. We have had a number of interesting issuances. We will continue to market locally. We need to now start to build scale. We are working with some of our local banks, and we've got some exciting propositions in engaging with them. We're also looking to expand into Africa, particularly in the infrastructure and then, of course, in the SME space. Of course, ultimately, we may move to cap table management or even possibly secondary trading that would potentially create new licensing requirements, but that is most certainly in the offing.
The response that we've had so far has been extremely positive, much higher than we had budgeted and forecast in the first few months. The pipeline is strong. We will continue to interact with the market and make sure that we're as responsive as we can be in crafting that solution as we move into Africa.
Leila, you probably partly answered some of the interesting things you're doing in JPP with regards to attracting listings in the private markets, but, Howard's just asked a question saying any moves to attract new JSE listings. I know you've mentioned some of the IPO pipeline, stats, but maybe you want to talk through some of the other initiatives.
Thanks for that, Howard and I think you know, ultimately, there is a shift in capital formation, as I said earlier, and we're seeing larger listed companies in the listed space, and then smaller companies raising capital through what is now our private placements market, but through JV through private capital raises. I did discuss all the changes that we've introduced. We in our listings or are engaging the market on in our listings requirements. We have also engaged extensively with market participants our investment banks. We are running roadshows, both virtual and in person. We will be launching our SA Tomorrow conference with our president and key ministers, the governor of the Reserve Bank, and key listed entities.
That'll be middle of October. That is also an area of focus to try and increase interest and increase investor eyeballs into the country because the primary market is a circular and reinforcing sort of compounding effect between liquidity and number of investors.
Thank you very much, Leila and Carmini. It looked like there are no more questions in the chat.
Thank you all so much for your time this afternoon. We look forward to one-on-ones with many of you. Please do reach out to Carmini or to ourselves directly if you have any more questions.
Thank you all.