In 2020, the Lagos state government banned commercial motorcycles — and nearly killed OPay in the process.

The company had launched in Nigeria in 2018 with those green OPay motorcycles everywhere in Lagos. When the ban hit, OPay pivoted fast, shut down its logistics arms, and poured everything into financial services and agent banking. That forced pivot — executed under pressure, without a fallback plan — turns out to be the origin story of one of Africa's most consequential fintech companies. Because what OPay found when it planted its flag in payments wasn't just a market. It found a structural failure that Nigeria's traditional banks had spent decades creating and couldn't fix. Technext

OPay filled a gap the traditional banks kept creating with their downtime, queues, and ₦50 charges per transfer. It built a massive agent network, developed products that actually worked, and priced everything cheaply enough that millions of Nigerians who had given up on the banks gave OPay a chance. Technext

Six years later, the company that rebuilt itself around that gap now wants Wall Street to price it at $4 billion.

The SoftBank-Backed Fintech Firm OPay's Numbers, Unvarnished

OPay Digital Services has engaged Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan Chase to prepare for a US initial public offering targeting a valuation of approximately $4 billion — a listing that could happen before the end of 2026. That figure represents a doubling of its $2 billion valuation from the 2021 Series C round that SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 led. Dealsandadvisoryreport

The metrics OPay brings to that negotiation are genuinely impressive. Today the company has over 50 million users, processes roughly $12 billion in monthly transactions, and operates more than 500,000 agents across Nigeria. Full-year 2025 revenue hit $614.8 million, up 28% year-on-year. Technext

$12 billion in monthly transaction volume. $614.8 million in annual revenue. 500,000 agents. These aren't the numbers of a startup anymore — they're the numbers of infrastructure.

OPay has also been deliberately grooming for public markets. In December 2025, the company appointed a new global management team, including former Opera CEO Lars Boilesen as co-CEO and James Perry — a former Citigroup managing director with over 25 years of investment banking experience — as CFO. You don't hire a banker with JPMorgan-level credentials to run your finance team unless you're serious about the next step being a prospectus. WeeTracker

Who's Actually Pushing This

The pressure to list isn't coming from OPay alone. Follow the money and you find multiple stakeholders with growing urgency.

Opera, the Norwegian browser company that incubated OPay in 2018, still holds a 9.5% stake in the fintech. That stake sat on Opera's balance sheet valued at $294.6 million at the end of 2025. A $36.3 million revaluation flowed directly into Opera's income statement as a fair value gain — and Opera's full-year 2025 net income was $108.3 million. Strip out the OPay fair value gain, and that figure falls to roughly $72 million, closer to what Opera earned in 2024 than the 34% growth it reported. Technext

In other words, Opera's growth story is partially borrowed from OPay's rising private valuation. An April 2026 securities filing showed Opera assigned an 85% probability to an OPay listing within two years. That's not confidence — that's a dependency. WeeTracker

Then there's SoftBank, which has been waiting since its Vision Fund 2 entry in 2021. The company has raised roughly $570 million to date, with SoftBank as a prominent investor alongside Meituan, Source Code Capital, and IDG Capital. Five years of patience from Masayoshi Son's fund, during a period when SoftBank's broader portfolio has been under scrutiny, creates its own timeline pressure. Dealsandadvisoryreport

"OPay is in a strong position going into a public offering — rare revenue scale, a defensible agent network, and a regulator [the CBN] that just made life harder for smaller competitors. The question isn't whether they deserve a premium. It's whether US public market investors, who don't know Lagos the way Lagos knows itself, will price Africa risk fairly. That's the gap OPay's IPO roadshow has to close." — Fintech analyst, West Africa financial services practice, speaking to regional press, April 2026

Nigeria's Regulatory Tailwind — and What It Really Means

The Central Bank of Nigeria handed OPay an unexpected gift in April 2026. A new CBN directive effective April 1 restricts point-of-sale agents to work with only one financial institution — a rule change that could benefit larger, more stable platforms like OPay by reducing competitive friction and consolidating agent networks. Ainvest

For a company going public on the strength of its 500,000-agent distribution network, that regulatory change is almost perfectly timed. It raises the cost for competitors to maintain comparable reach and effectively locks agents into deeper loyalty with their primary platform. OPay, with the largest agent network in Nigeria, captures the most from that consolidation.

Nigeria's fintech market is valued at an estimated $5.2 billion in 2025 and projected to reach $17.1 billion by 2033, characterized by a large unbanked and underbanked population, high smartphone penetration, and a dynamic competitive landscape. OPay's rivals — Moniepoint, PalmPay, and Flutterwave — are formidable. Moniepoint processes over $22 billion in monthly transaction volume and achieved profitability before its 2024 Series C. PalmPay has its own 500,000-agent network. None of this is a clear field. AU-Startups

But OPay's scale advantage in revenue — $614.8 million annually versus Moniepoint's annualised revenue that's believed to still be well below $200 million — gives it a different conversation with institutional investors. Revenue at that level, growing at 28%, is a public-markets story. Sub-$200 million is still a private-markets conversation.

The Skeptic's Corner

Before the IPO roadshow hits New York, a few hard questions deserve airtime.

The company's path to profitability isn't cleanly documented. While OPay achieved its first monthly profitability in May 2024 with daily active trading users surpassing 9 million, whether that profitability has since scaled — or whether it remains episodic — is something OPay hasn't publicly confirmed. The SEC prospectus will force disclosure that no private company wants to volunteer. AU-Startups

There's also the revenue-per-user math. When OPay files its IPO prospectus, it will have to disclose how many of its users are genuinely active versus just registered, what revenue per user looks like, and how much of its business comes from lending — which depends heavily on analysing user behaviour to decide who gets credit and at what rate. Technext

Fifty million registered users sounds compelling. But in Nigeria's fiercely competitive mobile money market, where consumers routinely hold multiple wallets and switch between them for better rates or promotions, the gap between registered and genuinely active can be uncomfortably wide. US institutional investors learned that lesson from Jumia's 2019 NYSE listing, which saw the Africa-focused e-commerce company's stock collapse from its IPO price as unit economics disappointed. OPay will need a convincing answer on active user quality.

The plans are still in early preparation stages and details around timing and final valuation remain subject to market conditions and regulatory approvals. No formal SEC filing has been disclosed yet. Dealsandadvisoryreport

Africa's Moment at the Window

Zoom out and OPay's IPO attempt reads as something larger than one company's liquidity event.

A successful US listing would mark a major milestone for Africa's tech ecosystem, echoing the impact of Jumia's 2019 debut on the New York Stock Exchange. Access to deep institutional capital pools in the US could reshape global perceptions of African fintech as both high-growth and increasingly viable — and could revive investor appetite following a funding slowdown across Africa in 2025, potentially unlocking capital for other players in payments, lending, and embedded finance. NewsOnline Nigeria

A listing would follow SoftBank's recent successful US IPO of its Japanese payments unit PayPay, completed in March 2026 — a relevant data point that tells you SoftBank sees the current window as genuinely open, not just optimistic. The fund isn't pushing OPay to the exit alone; it's running a coordinated portfolio harvest while conditions are right. Dealsandadvisoryreport

What makes OPay's story different from Jumia's — the cautionary tale every Africa-focused investor mentions — is the underlying business model. Jumia was building e-commerce in markets without the logistics infrastructure to support it. OPay built its infrastructure first. The agent network is the business. It's physical, real, and not dependent on consumer behavior that can evaporate with a promotion change.

What to Watch

The trajectory from here hinges on three things founders and operators tracking African fintech should monitor closely.

The SEC filing, when it comes, will be the moment of truth. Prospectus-level disclosure on active users, revenue mix between payments, lending, and value-added services, and geographic revenue breakdown will either confirm OPay's scale story or complicate it materially. The quality of that disclosure will determine whether the $4 billion target holds through the book-building process.

The competitive response from Moniepoint and Flutterwave matters too. OPay's IPO is being viewed as a potential watershed moment. If completed successfully, it could pave the way for other fast-scaling fintech peers such as Flutterwave and Moniepoint, both of which are widely seen as candidates for future international listings. A successful OPay debut creates a public market comparable that re-prices the whole sector. A stumble does the opposite — and makes those future listings harder. Brand Icon Image

And then there's expansion. OPay already has a presence in Egypt and Pakistan beyond its Nigerian core. Whether it can credibly pitch US investors on a multi-market growth story — rather than a Nigeria-concentrated bet — will shape the multiple it commands. The difference between being valued as a high-growth emerging market payments company and being valued as a single-country operator is measurable in billions.

This is what the SoftBank-backed fintech firm OPay is taking to Wall Street: a company built in the gaps of a broken banking system, by people who moved fast when the motorcycles got banned. Whether the Street prices that story at $4 billion depends on how convincingly OPay explains that what looks like a Nigerian fintech is actually a template — one that travels