OPay Doubled Its Transaction Volume to $358bn in 2025. Now It Wants Wall Street to Price That Growth at $4bn.

OPay Limited processed $358 billion in gross transaction value in 2025, more than double the $166.2 billion recorded in 2024, a 115% increase that the Nigerian fintech is now taking into conversations with US capital markets as it prepares for a potential initial public offering targeting a $4 billion valuation.

The transaction growth was accompanied by a significant expansion in OPay's customer base and lending operations. Monthly active users rose 57% to 39.3 million, daily active users increased 50% to 22.7 million in Q4 2025, giving the platform a daily-to-monthly active user ratio of 57.8%, and new loans originated surged 285% from $243.9 million in 2024 to $938.3 million in 2025, while quarterly unique borrowers in Nigeria rose 119% to 4.6 million.

OPay has engaged Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase to prepare the IPO process, with the company reportedly able to proceed with the offering later in 2026, though the timing and size remain under consideration. Neither OPay nor the banks involved have publicly commented on the proposed transaction.

The proposed listing, if consummated at the projected $4 billion valuation, would represent a major leap from the company's last publicly disclosed valuation in 2021, when it raised $400 million in a Series C funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund at a $2 billion valuation. Opera, an early investor, subsequently valued its stake at an implied company valuation of roughly $3.1 billion in a regulatory filing, suggesting the $4 billion target reflects a modest premium over the most recent implied market price rather than a dramatic re-rating.

The road to Wall Street carries its own complications. OPay's ownership structure, founded by Chinese billionaire Zhou Yahui and backed by SoftBank, gives the company significant Chinese ties at a moment when US regulators and investors carry heightened sensitivity to data privacy, corporate governance and capital flows between Nigeria-focused operations and Chinese-linked parent entities. The planned US listing has generated debate among Nigerian investors and market participants, because Nigeria accounts for the overwhelming majority of OPay's revenue, reviving calls for successful Nigerian technology companies to list on domestic or African exchanges rather than export their equity stories to foreign markets.

The tension in that debate is real but not new. OPay built its 39.3 million active users and its $358 billion transaction volume almost entirely from Nigerian consumers navigating an infrastructure gap that Nigeria's own banks could not fill. The agent banking network, the ₦50 transfer that works when the traditional banking app fails, the mobile loan that reaches a borrower 4.6 million times a quarter all of it is a Nigerian story. Whether the proceeds of monetising that story flow to SoftBank and Wall Street institutional funds or partially back to the NGX is a policy question Nigeria does not currently have the regulatory tools to answer. The Dangote Refinery IPO may inadvertently provide part of the answer: if a $5 billion transaction can be absorbed by the NGX in October, the case for routing OPay's offering through Lagos rather than New York becomes considerably harder to dismiss.

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