OPay IPO: Valuation, NGX Listing and Everything Investors Need to Know

OPay is preparing for one of the most closely watched fintech listings in Africa. The Nigeria-based payment startup giant is preparing to go public in the United States at a reported valuation of roughly $4 billion.  

It is also speculated that the company will list on the Nigerian Exchange (NGX) after its US outing. For a company that earns nearly nine out of every ten dollars in Nigeria, that second question may matter just as much to local investors as the headline U.S. IPO itself.

This guide breaks down what is actually confirmed about the OPay IPO, what remains speculation, and what the company's 2025 financial results reveal about whether the $4 billion price tag makes sense.

What Is OPay, and Why Does Its IPO Matter?

OPay was founded in 2018 as a mobile-first payments company built for Nigeria's underbanked population. It has since grown into a full digital financial-services platform spanning transfers, savings, lending, merchant services and point-of-sale solutions. Originally incubated by Opera, the company attracted major international backing early on, culminating in a 2021 funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 that valued OPay at approximately $2 billion, with Sequoia Capital China, Redpoint China and Source Code Capital also participating.

That $2 billion private valuation from 2021 is worth keeping in mind, because it means the reported $4 billion IPO target would represent a doubling of OPay's value in five years — a period during which the company moved from losses to meaningful profitability.

The IPO matters for three reasons. First, it would give public investors direct access to one of the most prominent fintech businesses operating anywhere in Africa. Second, a public listing forces real transparency: quarterly reporting, audited disclosures and a market-tested valuation, rather than numbers set privately between the company and venture investors. Third, and most relevant to Nigerian readers, a possible secondary listing on the NGX would let local investors — retail traders, pension funds, asset managers and insurers — buy equity in a company whose fortunes are overwhelmingly tied to the Nigerian economy.

When Is the OPay IPO? No Official Date Yet

No confirmed IPO date exists. What is known is that Bloomberg reported in early September 2026 that OPay is working with Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase and is expected to unveil its U.S. IPO prospectus soon. That is a meaningful signal — banks of that caliber typically join only once a transaction has moved well past the exploratory stage — but it still falls short of a confirmed listing date.

It helps to separate the stages of an IPO clearly, because financial media often blur them together. Preparing for an offering, filing a prospectus, receiving regulatory clearance, setting a price range, pricing the deal and actually beginning to trade are six distinct milestones, and OPay has only crossed the first of them publicly. Until the company files its formal prospectus, any date or price quoted in the press should be treated as a rumor rather than a fact.

Once that prospectus lands, it will reveal far more than the headline valuation. Investors should expect it to disclose the number of shares on offer, the proposed price range, the split between primary and secondary shares, the ownership structure, how proceeds will be used, historical audited financials, outstanding preferred shares, related-party transactions and shareholder voting rights. That document — not the $4 billion figure currently circulating — will be the real basis for judging the deal.

OPay's Reported $4 Billion Valuation, Explained

A $4 billion valuation is meaningless without context, so it's worth running the numbers against OPay's actual 2025 financial performance.

On revenue of $536.3 million in 2025, a $4 billion price tag works out to roughly 7.5 times revenue. Against net profit of $72.5 million, it implies a price-to-earnings ratio near 55 times. And measured against reported EBITDA of $113.2 million, the multiple comes out to approximately 35 times.

These are back-of-envelope calculations rather than a formal enterprise-value analysis, since OPay hasn't yet disclosed its final capital structure, cash position, debt load, preferred-share treatment or fully diluted share count. Still, the takeaway is clear: at $4 billion, the market would be pricing OPay as a high-growth technology company, not as an ordinary financial institution. Traditional Nigerian banks typically trade on far more modest earnings multiples, so anyone comparing OPay's valuation directly to a listed bank's is comparing two fundamentally different investment cases.

Whether that premium is justified depends less on today's profit and more on whether OPay can keep growing fast enough to grow into the multiple — a question only time, and the eventual prospectus, can answer.

Inside OPay's 2025 Numbers: From Losses to Profit

The clearest argument in OPay's IPO story isn't the valuation figure — it's the turnaround in the underlying business between 2024 and 2025.

Revenue jumped from $205.7 million to $536.3 million, a 161% increase. Gross transaction value (GTV), the total value of payments flowing through the platform, rose 115% to $358 billion. Monthly active users climbed 57% to 39.3 million. And perhaps most importantly, the company flipped from a net loss of roughly $51 million in 2024 to a net profit of about $72.5 million in 2025, with operating income and EBITDA turning positive alongside it.

That last point deserves emphasis. Many fintech IPOs are pitched purely as growth stories, asking investors to trust that profitability will eventually follow scale. OPay is instead walking into the public market having already made that transition, which is a materially stronger position from which to defend a premium valuation.

It's worth distinguishing GTV from revenue, since the two are often confused. GTV of $358 billion reflects the total value of transactions moving through OPay's platform — not money the company actually keeps. If a user transfers ₦100,000 through the app, OPay doesn't record that full amount as income; it earns a fee, commission or interest margin on top. GTV is best read as a measure of ecosystem scale and activity, while revenue reflects how effectively OPay monetizes that scale. The fact that both grew together in 2025 suggests the company is getting better at converting transaction volume into actual income.

User engagement tells a similar story of deepening, not just widening. Fourth-quarter daily active users rose 50% to about 22.7 million, producing a daily-to-monthly active user ratio near 58%. According to company-reported data, roughly 70% of OPay's Nigerian wallet users were using more than five product features as of March 2026, with 96% next-month retention among that group. In plain terms, OPay isn't just adding new users — it's getting existing users to adopt more products and stick around, which is the foundation of the "financial super-app" thesis that underpins much of its valuation.

The Lending Business: OPay's Biggest Opportunity and Its Biggest Risk

Nowhere is OPay's growth more dramatic, or more worth scrutinizing, than in its lending arm. New loans originated jumped from $243.9 million in 2024 to $938.3 million in 2025 — a 285% increase — while quarterly unique borrowers in Nigeria more than doubled, from 2.1 million to roughly 4.6 million.

Lending is attractive to fintech platforms because it converts an existing user base into a high-margin revenue stream without the cost of acquiring new customers. But rapid loan growth also carries real risk: rising credit losses, heavier provisioning requirements, tighter regulatory scrutiny and greater earnings volatility if borrowers start defaulting faster than expected.

When OPay's prospectus is finally published, its lending disclosures will be worth reading more carefully than almost anything else in the document. Loan book size, delinquency rates, non-performing loan ratios, credit-loss provisions, net charge-offs and funding structure will together determine whether this lending growth is sustainable or whether it's building up risk that hasn't yet shown up in the numbers.

Why Nigeria Still Drives Nearly Everything OPay Does

Despite operating in multiple markets, OPay remains overwhelmingly a Nigerian business. Nigeria accounted for 88.1% of 2025 revenue, with Indonesia contributing 9.9%, Egypt 1.6%, and all other markets combined just 0.4%.

That concentration cuts both ways. It gives OPay a dominant position in one of the world's largest and fastest-growing digital-payments markets, but it also means the company's fortunes are unusually exposed to shifts in Nigerian monetary policy, banking and fintech regulation, consumer-credit rules, foreign-exchange policy and tax treatment. A single CBN policy change or a sharp naira devaluation could move OPay's reported results more than almost any competitor factor.

This concentration is exactly why the possibility of an NGX listing has generated so much interest domestically — a company this tied to Nigeria's economy arguably belongs, at least in part, on Nigeria's stock exchange.

Will OPay List on the NGX? What We Actually Know

This is the question generating the most local buzz, and the honest answer is: possibly, but nothing is confirmed. Bloomberg reported on September 2, 2026, that OPay is considering a secondary listing in Nigeria following its U.S. IPO, though both OPay and the NGX declined to comment when asked. Nairametrics had reported a similar plan back in August, again without confirmed structure or timing.

At this stage, the most accurate way to describe it is that OPay is reportedly considering an NGX secondary listing — not that a Nigerian IPO date or price has been set, because it hasn't.

The idea fits into a broader push from NGX leadership. Group CEO Temi Popoola has publicly advocated for more of Nigeria's high-growth private companies, including fintechs like OPay and PalmPay, to list domestically rather than exclusively abroad. The logic is straightforward: if a company builds most of its value from Nigerian consumers and merchants, Nigerian investors should have a real opportunity to share in that value creation. Given that 88.1% revenue concentration, OPay is arguably the clearest test case for that argument yet.

What Could OPay Be Worth on the NGX — and What Would a Share Cost?

It's tempting to convert the $4 billion figure straight into naira, and doing so is a useful exercise, but not a reliable prediction. At an illustrative exchange rate of ₦1,500 to the dollar, $4 billion converts to roughly ₦6 trillion. That doesn't mean OPay would carry a ₦6 trillion NGX market capitalization — the real figure would hinge on the eventual IPO valuation, the prevailing exchange rate at listing, the capital structure, how preferred shares are treated, and broader market conditions at the time. But it does illustrate the scale: a company valued anywhere near $4 billion could rank among the largest names on the Nigerian Exchange.

Share price is a separate calculation entirely, and it's one that's impossible to estimate accurately today because it depends entirely on how many shares exist. A ₦6 trillion valuation would translate to roughly ₦6,000 per share if there were 1 billion shares outstanding, but only about ₦1,200 per share with 5 billion shares, or ₦600 per share with 10 billion. All three scenarios represent the identical company value — only the share count changes. Any article claiming to know OPay's eventual share price before the company discloses its capital structure is speculating, not reporting.

The Bull Case: Why Investors Are Excited

Five factors underpin the optimistic view of OPay's IPO. Revenue grew 161% in 2025, exceptional for a company already operating at significant scale. GTV expansion of 115% to $358 billion shows the platform's transaction activity is still accelerating rather than plateauing. The swing from a $51 million loss to a $72.5 million profit, alongside positive operating income and EBITDA, demonstrates that growth and discipline can coexist. A base of nearly 40 million monthly active users gives OPay enormous room to cross-sell new products without the cost of acquiring fresh customers. And rising product penetration — users adopting savings, credit and other services beyond simple payments — suggests the company is successfully building the higher-margin "super-app" model that tends to command premium valuations.

The Bear Case: What Could Go Wrong

The risks are just as concrete. OPay operates in a heavily regulated environment, and shifts in CBN policy, consumer-protection rules, lending regulation or capital requirements could all affect the business meaningfully. The lending book's rapid 285% growth raises real questions about credit quality that won't be answerable until default and delinquency data is disclosed. Nigeria's 88.1% share of revenue is a strength today but a concentration risk if the domestic economy or regulatory climate turns unfavorable. At roughly 7.5 times revenue and more than 50 times earnings, the valuation already assumes substantial continued growth, leaving little room for disappointment. Competition from PalmPay, Moniepoint, Kuda and traditional banks remains intense. And for dollar-based investors, naira depreciation could erode the value of growth that looks strong in local-currency terms but shrinks once converted back to dollars.

Ultimately, the central question isn't whether $4 billion sounds like a lot of money — it's what future earnings and cash flows investors are actually paying for at that price, and whether OPay can deliver high growth, improving margins and disciplined credit management all at once. If growth slows while credit losses rise, a premium valuation built on 2025's numbers could prove difficult to defend.

How OPay Compares to Nigerian Banks and Other African Fintechs

Traditional Nigerian banks are typically valued using metrics like price-to-book, price-to-earnings, return on equity, net interest margin and dividend yield. Fintech investors, by contrast, tend to focus more on revenue growth, GTV, active users, retention, revenue per user and operating leverage. OPay sits uncomfortably — and interestingly — between the two categories: it has a fintech platform's growth profile but increasingly offers the same financial services traditionally associated with banks, which makes its eventual public valuation one of the more closely debated aspects of the deal.

The listing also carries weight for the wider African fintech sector. Companies like Flutterwave and Chipper Cash have built substantial valuations in private markets, but private and public valuations don't always align once real audited earnings, cash flows and risk disclosures are put in front of public shareholders. OPay's IPO could end up setting the benchmark for how global investors price profitable African fintech businesses going forward.

How Can Investors Buy OPay Shares?

Right now, they can't. OPay remains a private company, and no shares are publicly tradable. Once the U.S. IPO is completed, access will depend on the final listing venue and which brokerages offer allocation. If a Nigerian secondary listing follows, local investors would likely be able to buy in through licensed NGX-registered stockbrokers, subject to whatever listing structure and regulatory conditions apply at the time. Investors should be wary of anyone currently offering "OPay IPO shares" outside a documented, regulated offering — the company's official prospectus and formal exchange announcements are the only reliable sources once the process moves forward.

OPay IPO Timeline at a Glance

OPay launched its mobile-payments business in Nigeria in 2018 and raised additional venture funding through 2019 as it expanded. In 2021, SoftBank's $400 million round valued the company at roughly $2 billion. By 2024, revenue had reached $205.7 million, though the company was still unprofitable. That changed in 2025, when revenue rose to $536.3 million, GTV hit $358 billion, and OPay returned to profitability. In August 2026, reports first surfaced of a proposed U.S. IPO near $4 billion alongside early speculation about an NGX listing. By September 2026, Bloomberg confirmed OPay was considering a secondary Nigerian listing following the U.S. offering and was expected to unveil its U.S. prospectus soon.

The milestones still ahead include publication of the U.S. prospectus, disclosure of the IPO price range, the final valuation, pricing, the actual U.S. listing, and — separately — any formal announcement and timetable for an NGX listing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is OPay going public? OPay is preparing for a proposed U.S. IPO, and Bloomberg reports the company is expected to unveil its prospectus soon.

How much is OPay worth? The company is reportedly targeting an IPO valuation of approximately $4 billion, though this is a target rather than a confirmed final figure.

When is the OPay IPO? No official date has been announced.

Will OPay list on the Nigerian Exchange? It's reportedly under consideration as a secondary listing following the U.S. IPO, but nothing has been formally confirmed.

Can I buy OPay shares now? No — the company is still private. Investors should wait for the official prospectus and final offering documents.

What was OPay's 2025 revenue? Approximately $536.3 million, up 161% year-on-year.

Was OPay profitable in 2025? Yes, with net profit of about $72.5 million, compared with a loss of roughly $51 million in 2024.

How much did OPay process in transactions in 2025? Around $358 billion in gross transaction value, up 115% from 2024.

Who is advising OPay on the IPO? Bloomberg reports that Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase are working with the company on the proposed offering.

The Bottom Line

OPay has grown from a Nigerian mobile-payments startup into a full-scale digital financial-services platform, and its 2025 results capture that transformation clearly: revenue more than doubled, GTV reached $358 billion, monthly active users climbed to 39.3 million, and the company turned profitable while its lending business expanded rapidly. The reported $4 billion IPO valuation is a bet that this growth can continue alongside improving margins and disciplined credit management.

For now, what's confirmed is limited: the U.S. IPO process is advancing, the $4 billion figure is a reported target rather than a locked-in number, the prospectus is expected to be the next major disclosure, and an NGX secondary listing remains under consideration rather than confirmed. Investors — particularly those in Nigeria hoping to gain direct exposure to one of the country's largest fintech success stories — should treat every valuation, date and share-price figure circulating before the official prospectus as provisional, and wait for OPay's own disclosures before drawing firm conclusions.