Riding on its Western-friendly business climate and a growing footprint south  of the Sahara, Morocco is positioning its capital Casablanca as Africa’s “modern financial hub” that will offer investors a safe gateway into Africa’s fast-emerging market.

OZY reported that a number of Moroccan companies are defying geopolitical and ethnic lines and crossing the largest desert in the world to the southern part of Africa  to invest in fast growing economies.

With its political and economic stability, the north African country is offering western investors a chance to invest in the region without taking up much of the risk associated with rickety governance in most sub-Saharan countries.

Morocco offers the kind of political and economic stability the private sector craves, but is oh-so-elusive on this continent, OZY reported.

“Investing in Morocco’s stock market means  investing in the potential growth of the continent,” Karim Hajji, the debonair CEO of the Casablanca Stock Exchange, told delegates at an event on Washington earlier in August.

The market capitalization of the Casablanca Stock Exchange, for example, is $60 billion — one of the continent’s largest. Though it doesn’t yet list any sub-Saharan firms, Hajji is intent on finding some, part of his broader Pan-African vision.

Other Moroccan financial institutions are already well-established south of the Sahara, their investments concentrated in fellow former French colonies. The country’s two main banks, Attijariwafa and BMCE, have one of the continent’s largest networks of retail banking holdings; their branches dot countries like Mali, Senegal and Ivory Coast.

Economic forecasters are betting banking will go gangbusters as more and more Africans move into the middle class and seek out services to manage newfound income.

Maroc Telecom, meanwhile, is the market leader for cell phone service in French-speaking Africa, according to a new report by the Atlantic Council.

Morocco’s trade with sub-Saharan Africa still constitutes a small margin of the kingdom’s total exports, roughly 5 percent. But it’s grown over the last decade.

The Moroccan government has negotiated a number of trade agreements on the continent, and has pacts with three of the continent’s major trade blocs in the works, Peter Pham,  director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council, told OXY. It has also established strong commercial ties with the West, particularly Europe.