OPay is preparing to list its shares on the Nigerian Exchange, according to people familiar with the matter, setting up a domestic listing that could land just as the fintech giant chases a $4 billion valuation on Wall Street. Nairametrics first reported the plan on August 27, citing sources close to the company, and said OPay is expected to formally announce the listing soon.
The timing is not accidental. OPay has spent months working with Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan on a proposed US initial public offering, with Standard Bank Group separately in early-stage talks about buying a pre-IPO stake, according to reports from Bloomberg and Dabafinance. Neither OPay nor Standard Bank has confirmed a transaction. What remains unclear is whether Lagos and New York are meant to happen together or represent two separate tracks entirely — a dual-listing question OPay has not yet answered publicly.
Why Nigeria Wants This Listing Badly
The push for a local listing did not originate inside OPay. NGX Group chief executive Temi Popoola told President Bola Tinubu in early August that Nigeria needed policies compelling successful fintech and e-commerce firms to list at home, naming OPay and PalmPay directly as candidates weighing listings abroad instead. That request lands against an uncomfortable backdrop: the NGX Technology Board, created in 2022 specifically to attract high-growth startups, has not recorded a single IPO in three years, even as Nigeria produced unicorns like Flutterwave and Moniepoint.
An OPay listing would break that drought and hand Nigerian investors direct exposure to a company that has quietly become one of the country’s most important financial rails. OPay processed $358 billion in gross transaction value in 2025, up 115 percent from $166.2 billion the year before, according to figures cited by The Trumpet and Technext24. Revenue rose 161 percent to $536.3 million, and the company swung from a $35.1 million operating loss in 2024 to $107.1 million in operating income. Nigeria alone accounted for 88.1 percent of that revenue, a concentration that makes the NGX pitch — give Nigerians a stake in a company built almost entirely on Nigerian transactions — genuinely compelling.
The Numbers Nobody Has Confirmed Yet
None of the details that would actually let an investor decide anything have been disclosed. Timing, offer size, valuation for the local listing, and the percentage of shares reserved for Nigerian buyers all remain unknown. OPay’s spokesperson did not provide further comment when contacted by Nairametrics. That silence matters more than it might elsewhere, because OPay’s private valuation has already moved from $2 billion after a 2021 SoftBank-led round to a reported $3 billion to $4 billion target for the US listing — a wide enough band that Nigerian retail investors would be buying into real uncertainty about price.
There is also a harder question sitting underneath the enthusiasm. NGX listings and US listings answer to different masters. A New York float, run by three global banks, is built to satisfy institutional investors chasing dollar returns and clean corporate-governance disclosures. An NGX listing, structured around naira and a much shallower pool of institutional capital, serves a more political goal: visible, local ownership of a company Nigerians already use every day. Executing both without one undercutting the other’s valuation logic is not a trivial exercise, and OPay has given no indication yet of how it plans to sequence the two.
What to Watch Next
OPay’s next move is the formal announcement Nairametrics says is coming soon, which should clarify at minimum whether the Lagos and New York processes are linked. Standard Bank’s pre-IPO stake talks, if they close, would also shape how much room is left for retail Nigerian ownership by the time NGX shares go live. And with Nigeria’s capital market posting one of its strongest years globally in 2026, the pressure on OPay to prove that a homegrown fintech unicorn can list at home — not just talk about it — has rarely been higher.
