Send your OPay

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.