🍞 OPay, from the brink of failure, to Nigeria's largest fintech

Hello,

It’s Demilade, finally home after many weeks of waka, and I’m happy I finally get a moment to zoom out. September is shaping up to be interesting. Dangote lists on the NGX next month, adding $1.6bn to the exchange and a company worth $40bn plus. A week later, 31 Nigerian companies will be listed on a UK stock market index, bringing foreign investors into about 20% of the companies on the exchange. Amid that, one of the most consequential Fintechs in Nigeria’s history is planning to list at $4 bn (The highest valuation for a Nigerian tech company) in New York… and maybe in Lagos.

OPay, for most Nigerian’s including myself, is the bank of the people, where an increasing portion of our lives occur. In today’s deep dive, we uncover the origins and business of OPay, on it’s way to its historic IPO.

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Enjoy!
Demilade

📈 Equities. The NGX ended the week barely changed but green. The All-Share Index closed at 244,973.54, up 0.25% over seven days even after a 1.09% slide on the day, while the NGX 30 added 0.44%.

💱 Currency. The naira firmed across the board at the interbank window. It strengthened 1.26% against the dollar to ₦1,318.25, and gained 1.07% on the euro (₦1,536.87) and 1.21% on the pound (₦1,789.95). Little moved on the day, but the week was a clean run of gains for the currency.

🛢️ Commodities. Brent crude did the heavy lifting, rallying 7.76% over the week to $97.86 a barrel. For an economy where oil still anchors export earnings and government revenue, a near-8% weekly jump is a real tailwind for both the fiscal position and the naira.

In 2020, OPay looked finished. Its flagship motorbike-hailing service, ORide, had absorbed close to $40 million, and a Lagos State ban on commercial motorcycles erased it almost overnight. Food delivery, logistics, ride-hailing and e-commerce were shut in quick succession.

Today OPay is preparing a US initial public offering targeting a valuation of about $4 billion, with Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan working on the deal. It would be the largest technology listing ever to emerge from Nigeria.

The story of OPay is the story of a company that failed at almost everything it first set out to do, and “accidentally” built something far more valuable in the wreckage: a payments utility that most Nigerians now treat as a bank.

In 2011 Tencent, one of the largest companies in China, launched WeChat as a messaging app. Within a few years it had become the operating system for daily life in China: a single place to chat, pay a street vendor, split a bill, hail a car, order food, book a doctor and buy investments. Alibaba's Alipay did much the same on the commerce side. The model became the most coveted idea in emerging-market technology. Grab and Gojek chased it across Southeast Asia.

For Opera, a Chinese phone and browser maker, the bet was simple. If it worked in China and Jakarta, why not Lagos? Nigeria had a young, mobile-first population and weak incumbent banks. Whoever owned the everything-app would own the customer.

OPay was Nigeria's super-app bid, and it was, in effect, a Chinese playbook run in Lagos. At launch, it fanned out across verticals at once: ORide for motorbikes, OCar, OBus and OTrike for other transport, OExpress for logistics, OFood for delivery, OMall and OTrade for e-commerce, OKash for lending and OWealth for savings. The wallet sat in the middle, and everything else existed to feed it.

OPay did not appear from nowhere. Its parent, Opera, had already spent years building an audience in Africa.

Opera's asset was Opera Mini, a data-saving mobile browser that compressed pages and cut data use by roughly 90%. In markets where data was expensive and phones were cheap, that mattered. By 2021 Opera counted nearly 150 million monthly active users across Africa, and Nigeria was one of its largest markets. When OPay launched, it launched on top of the audience Opera already owned.

The company was co-founded in late 2017 by Opera and Balder Investment, a vehicle controlled by Opera chairman Yahui Zhou, and rolled out in Nigeria in 2018. The early money was Chinese: a Series A backed by Opera, Sequoia China and IDG Capital, then a $120 million Series B in November 2019 with Meituan and SoftBank Ventures Asia. Nigeria was the target because the gap was obvious. More than 40% of adults were unbanked, mobile penetration was climbing fast, and traditional banking was costly and unreliable.

Then the model broke. The February 2020 Lagos okada ban killed ORide in its biggest market. COVID-19 finished off the transport and delivery businesses. OKash, the lending arm, was pulled after a controversy over its practices and a clash with Google's Play Store policies. By mid-2020, OPay had shut nearly everything except payments.

The pivot was less a strategy than a survival instinct. Payments was the one vertical that kept growing, so the company poured everything into it. In hindsight, the failed businesses had done a job: they seeded the wallet and built out an agent network at someone else's expense. The accelerant came in 2023, when the Central Bank's naira-redesign policy triggered a physical-cash crunch. With banknotes scarce, Nigerians moved onto apps like OPay in enormous numbers, and the payments business never looked back.

OPay is primarily a consumer wallet. Users hold a balance, send instant transfers, buy airtime, pay bills and access savings through OWealth and small loans through the app. Transfers are cheap and fast, which is the entire point in a country where bank apps frequently fail mid-transaction. OPay charges roughly ₦50 (about $0.03) on transfers of ₦10,000 and above, undercutting the traditional banks on transfers of less than ₦10,000, which is the bulk for most Nigerians. 

The second is the agent network, and this is what makes OPay work in Nigeria specifically. Across the country, an estimated 500,000-plus agents sit at kiosks and shopfronts with a phone and a small point-of-sale terminal. They are human ATMs. A trader with cash but no bank branch nearby deposits it with an agent; a customer who needs physical naira withdraws it from one. In an economy that is still heavily cash-based, informal and under-branched, that last-mile bridge is the product. This is the Nigerian iteration of MoMo, or mobile money; a system of banking, common across several African countries, and predicated on telcos as banks. 

OPay makes money on transfer fees, on lending, and on the float sitting in tens of millions of wallets. The scale is now large! OPay processed $358 billion in gross transaction value in 2025, more than double the $166.2 billion of 2024. Nigeria accounts for roughly 88% of revenue. Crucially, the company swung from an operating loss of about $35.1 million in 2024 to operating income of about $107.1 million in 2025.

If OPay owns the consumer side, Moniepoint owns the merchant side. It began in 2015 as TeamApt, building payment software for banks, before launching the Moniepoint agent-banking product in 2019 and rebranding in 2023. Where OPay chased the consumer wallet, Moniepoint chased the shopkeeper's terminal, and it now claims eight in ten in-person payments in Nigeria. PalmPay attacks OPay head-on for the consumer, helped by a distribution trick: it comes pre-installed on Tecno and Infinix phones through its backer, Transsion, which supplies a large share of Nigerian handsets.

Sources: Bloomberg, TechCabal, Nairametrics, Development Partners International, company disclosures. Figures drawn from different dates; see appendix.

Moniepoint reached unicorn status with a $110 million Series C in October 2024, led by Development Partners International with Google's Africa Investment Fund, Verod Capital and Lightrock. It processed ₦412 trillion in 2025, which it frames as more than $250 billion in annual payment volume, according to TechCabal. PalmPay, meanwhile, is reportedly raising about $200 million at a valuation above $1 billion and weighing a Hong Kong listing, Bloomberg reported.

One regulatory change now hangs over all three. On 1 April 2026 the Central Bank restricted point-of-sale agents to working with only one financial institution. Analysts expect the rule to push agents towards the largest, most stable platforms, which should favour OPay and Moniepoint at the expense of smaller operators.

Regardless of competition, the bull case for OPay is straightforward. The company is now profitable; it is still growing volume fast, and Nigeria's shift from cash to digital is far from finished. Its former parent is a believer: in an April 2026 securities filing, Opera assigned an 85% probability to an OPay listing within two years, and modelled its stake accordingly.

OPay's valuation has climbed in a clean line. SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 led a $400 million round in 2021 that valued the company at $2 billion. Opera's filings then implied about $2.7 billion in early 2024 and about $3.1 billion by the end of 2025, based on its roughly 9.5% stake, worth $294.6 million. The reported US IPO target is $4 billion, with some analysts floating $5 billion. For a 2021 investor, that is roughly a double in dollar terms in five years.

The company has been quietly assembling a listing team. In December 2025 it installed a new global management structure: founder Yahui Zhou as executive chairman, former Opera chief executive Lars Boilesen as co-CEO for international expansion, and James Perry, a former Citigroup managing director with more than 25 years in investment banking, as chief financial officer. Hiring a career capital-markets banker as CFO is the clearest tell that a listing is coming.

OPay is reportedly weighing a secondary listing on the Nigerian Exchange alongside the US IPO. NGX chief executive Temi Popoola has been pressing the country's biggest fintechs to list at home, arguing that Nigerians deserve to own stakes in the companies they use every day. He named OPay and PalmPay directly.

A secondary listing after New York is very different from a simultaneous dual listing, and depositary receipts behave differently from directly listed shares when it comes to liquidity and pricing. The NGX has launched a technology board and still has not recorded a single tech IPO.

Watch: the structure and timing of any NGX listing relative to New York. That, more than the headline $4 billion, determines whether Nigerians and the diaspora get genuine dollar-linked exposure to the app in their pocket, or a thin naira-quoted line that tracks it from a distance.

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Africa's largest cement maker hosts a Capital Markets Day in London on 21 September to court international investors ahead of a proposed LSE secondary listing. Aliko Dangote told the Financial Times that about 10% of the company could go to outside investors, with JPMorgan, Citigroup and Standard Bank advising. The stock has climbed 98.85% in a year, lifting market cap to about ₦17.3 trillion ($13 billion). For diaspora readers, a London line offers a second, likely more liquid, way into one of Africa's most profitable industrial names.

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Nigeria's largest airline reclaimed 10th place among African carriers in September with 354,804 scheduled seats, up 54.7% year-on-year and the fastest growth in the ranking. It displaced Kenya Airways; Ethiopian Airlines still leads with more than 2 million seats. Africa-wide capacity rose 9.4% to 25.8 million seats, with domestic growth (11.6%) outpacing international. The read-across: a recovering aviation market that feeds hospitality and logistics, though rising jet-fuel costs remain a margin headwind.

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Nigeria's currency is set for its strongest annual gain in nearly a decade, appreciating into a vote that usually weakens it. The naira trades near ₦1,329 to the dollar, a two-year high; a roughly 8% gain in 2026 could reach almost 12% by year-end, per analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. With the dollar flat to firmer, the strength is home-grown rather than borrowed from a soft dollar, backed by oil, remittances and reserves at a reported $53.9 billion. The catch: official and parallel rates are drifting apart again, an early-warning light before 2027.

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Abu Dhabi National Oil Company is in talks to buy a stake in the Dangote Petroleum Refinery, Bloomberg reported, days before Africa's largest fuel plant opens its share sale. Dangote signed offering documents on 7 September for 4.1 billion shares at ₦525 each, a raise of about ₦2.15 trillion ($1.63 billion) that values the refinery near $50 billion.

For ADNOC, a stake would place Gulf capital inside the facility reshaping West African fuel supply and secure a buyer for its crude. The refinery posted $1.82 billion in profit after tax in the first half of 2026, reversing a $476 million loss in 2025. Dangote plans to double capacity to 1.4 million barrels a day by 2029 at a cost of about $14.3 billion. The talks are private and may not close.

Watch: whether a foreign anchor investor firms up before the offer closes on 13 October.

Burkina Faso's gold exports reached about CFA5,882 billion ($10.1 billion) in 2025, and Saudi firm Sarmady Co has signalled interest in the sector. Sarmady has been invited to submit a formal proposal, so the talks remain exploratory.

Total exports climbed 88% to CFA6,442 billion, per the country's Directorate General of Customs, on record output of 94 tonnes. The United Arab Emirates and Switzerland bought the vast majority. The military government in Ouagadougou is pressing for greater state ownership and more domestic processing, having created a state mining vehicle and revised its mining code to capture more revenue. For a dollar-minded investor, the pull is gold priced in hard currency; the risk is a state tightening its grip on the asset.

Watch: whether Sarmady's interest survives Ouagadougou's push for a larger state share.

Congolian Financial, the finance arm of Angola's Carrinho group, has agreed to buy Banco BPI's entire 33.35% stake in Banco de Fomento Angola (BFA), the country's second-largest lender, for $452 million (€388.5 million). The deal ends a roughly 30-year Portuguese presence at the bank.

The price includes €345 million on completion, a deferred €43.5 million, and a variable sum tied to half of BFA's 2026 dividend, per Banco BPI. Completion needs clearance from the National Bank of Angola and the markets regulator, plus a decision by top shareholder Unitel not to exercise its pre-emption right. Nelson Carrinho already controls two other Angolan banks, a concentration flagged by Maka Angola.

Watch: whether regulators wave through one magnate's growing hold on Angolan banking.