OPay made $90.9 million in net profit in the first six months of 2026.
Its revenue reached $467 million, more than double the corresponding period in 2025. Almost 90% came from Nigeria, a market where incomes are relatively low, customers are highly sensitive to fees, and competition for financial services is intense.
But the most interesting revelation in OPay’s recent IPO filing is how it makes its money.
Payments, the service most Nigerians associate with OPay, contributed just 28% of revenue. Loan financing accounted for 50.6%, loan facilitation another 8.9%, and income from short-term investments approximately 10.8%.
OPay has become a substantial financial intermediary, generating earnings from relationships that often begin with everyday transactions.
That development has implications extending well beyond its shareholders.
Across Africa, millions of traders, small businesses and individuals generate income and conduct transactions without producing the records that conventional lenders and institutional investors typically require.
The economic activity has always existed. What has often been missing is an efficient way for organised capital to assess and finance it.
Companies such as OPay and Moniepoint are helping to close that gap.
They aggregate customers, record transactions, develop financial histories and provide financial services to people and businesses that can be expensive for conventional institutions to assess.
And as those relationships mature, they can produce financial assets that other institutions may be willing to fund or acquire.
We may be witnessing the development of new channels through which institutional capital can reach portions of Africa’s informal economy that have historically been difficult to finance.
OPay’s financial results provide an unusually detailed view of how that process begins.
The economic value behind a payment
Consider a trader in Lagos selling ₦100,000 worth of goods daily.
Over 25 trading days, that represents ₦2.5 million in monthly turnover — roughly $1,600 at an illustrative exchange rate of ₦1,550 to the dollar.
The trader may have operated successfully for years, buying inventory, paying suppliers and supporting a household. Yet obtaining a ₦500,000 working-capital facility could still be difficult.
A lender wants to understand the business’s earnings, expenses, existing obligations and ability to repay. The trader may have no formal accounts, conventional collateral or reliable transaction records.
Now suppose a meaningful proportion of those sales begins passing through a digital payment platform.
Over several months, the platform can observe daily receipts, transaction frequency, seasonal patterns and changes in commercial activity.
It still lacks a complete picture. Sales are different from profits, and the trader may have expenses, debts or cash transactions the platform cannot see.
Nevertheless, the information is useful. Combined with other evidence, it can help a financier decide whether to provide working capital, how much to offer and how repayments should be structured.
The trader’s economic activity has become easier to assess.
And if financing is provided, another important step occurs.
A conventional loan creates a contractual right to receive principal and interest repayments. That right is a financial asset.
Provided it is properly documented and enforceable, another institution may eventually be willing to finance or purchase it.
An everyday commercial relationship has begun producing something that organised capital can evaluate.
That is the underlying mechanism.
OPay shows why the intermediary can be profitable
Payments are a challenging business.
Customers want transfers to be inexpensive. Merchants resist charges. Competitors offer incentives, while providers must still pay for processing, infrastructure, compliance, fraud prevention and customer support.
OPay’s numbers illustrate that pressure.
Its payment revenue increased from approximately $69.9 million in H1 2025 to $130.6 million in H1 2026.
Over the same period, gross transaction value increased from $139.3 billion to $339.1 billion.
Payment revenue therefore grew considerably more slowly than transaction value.
Dividing payment revenue by transaction value produces an implied revenue yield of approximately 3.9 basis points in H1 2026, compared with 5.0 basis points a year earlier.
A basis point is one-hundredth of one percent. This is a rough revenue-to-transaction-value calculation, rather than OPay’s disclosed processing margin. Changes in transaction mix may explain part of the decline.
Still, the pattern is revealing.
OPay generated substantially more payment revenue despite earning less relative to the value of transactions processed.
Scale helped make that possible.
More importantly, the payment relationship created opportunities to offer additional financial products without repeatedly acquiring the same customer.
OPay reported customer acquisition costs of approximately $1.90 in H1 2026, excluding Indonesia.
That figure covers specified acquisition expenditure divided by new customers acquired. It does not capture every cost of retaining or serving them.
But it illustrates the potential advantage of a large distribution network.
A platform that acquires customers economically and subsequently provides several profitable services can generate considerably more value from each relationship than one relying primarily on payment fees.
OPay’s lending business demonstrates the opportunity.
It originated approximately $928 million in loans during H1 2026, compared with $305 million a year earlier. Its Nigerian quarterly unique borrowers increased from approximately 3.5 million to 6.7 million.
Those are substantial numbers.
But lending revenue tells only part of the story.
OPay recognised approximately $118 million in expected credit-loss provisions during the period.
At June 2026, it reported approximately $415 million in gross loans and interest receivable, against $90 million in loss allowances. It also recorded substantial principal write-offs.
These figures reflect the real cost of financing customers whose incomes and repayment capacity can be volatile.
There is, however, another useful indicator in the filing.
OPay’s reported non-performing-loan ratio — loans at least 90 days overdue — declined from 4.8% in June 2025 to 4.3% in June 2026.
Its measure of risk-adjusted net interest margin also improved from 19.2% to 21.1% over the corresponding half-year periods.
That measure reflects returns on a wider pool of interest-earning assets after specified funding and credit-loss costs. It is not a pure lending margin.
Taken together, the figures suggest improving reported portfolio-quality and risk-adjusted return measures alongside substantial growth in lending.
The test will be whether those economics remain attractive as volumes grow and economic conditions change.
For investors, that matters enormously.
A large loan book is valuable only to the extent that its expected collections, after losses and costs, produce an adequate return.
Moniepoint demonstrates the merchant opportunity
Moniepoint provides an important Nigerian comparison.
Its business developed around merchant payments, POS terminals and business banking.
In 2025, it reported processing approximately ₦412 trillion in transaction value — roughly $275 billion at an illustrative ₦1,500/$ — and disbursing more than ₦1 trillion in credit, equivalent to approximately $670 million.
Its lending approach explicitly incorporates merchants’ transaction histories, business patterns and payment behaviour.
Consider a provision store receiving daily payments through a Moniepoint terminal.
Over time, those receipts create a record of commercial activity that can help a financier understand turnover, seasonal patterns and potential repayment capacity.
For a business without formal financial statements, that information can be particularly useful.
OPay’s consumer-facing distribution and Moniepoint’s merchant relationships provide different kinds of information. Both can help reduce the cost of assessing customers who might otherwise remain difficult to finance.
Moniepoint’s private-company disclosures do not provide the same financial detail as OPay’s IPO filing, and its annual figures are not directly comparable with OPay’s half-year results.
Nevertheless, the scale of its payments and lending activities demonstrates that this is an increasingly important financial-services model.
The economic opportunity lies in the combination of customer access, information and the ability to provide suitable financial products.
And those products need not always be conventional loans.
Financing takes more than one form
A trader with consistent sales might need inventory before a busy season.
A transport operator might need a vehicle. A manufacturer might need equipment, while a supplier might prefer immediate payment rather than waiting 60 days for an invoice to be settled.
Each situation creates a financing opportunity.
A lender might advance money against future repayments. Another financier might purchase equipment and lease it to the business. A trade-finance provider might buy goods and resell them on deferred-payment terms.
An investor might purchase an existing invoice or other receivable at a discount.
Some arrangements charge interest. Others earn returns through rentals, trading margins, profit-sharing or ownership interests.
Their legal structures differ, including who owns the asset, who bears the risk and what each party is entitled to receive. Appropriately structured non-interest financing can therefore form part of the opportunity.
What these arrangements share is the need to understand the underlying commercial activity.
Who generates the money? How will the financier earn a return? What rights does it hold? What happens if the expected cash flows fail to materialise?
Reliable transaction records can make those questions easier to answer.
They may also help insurers assess certain risks, suppliers extend trade credit and investors evaluate smaller businesses.
And where financing arrangements create identifiable rights to future payments, those rights may themselves become assets that other institutions are willing to finance or acquire.
That is where the opportunity begins to extend beyond the platforms collecting the original transaction data.
Who provides the capital?
Identifying a financing opportunity is one thing. Finding the money to fund it is another.
OPay’s operations illustrate several possibilities.
In Nigeria, its self-operated lending business primarily finances loans through its own balance sheet.
Its deposit-taking subsidiary also accepts customer savings deposits, subject to applicable regulatory requirements.
The company reported approximately $533 million in short-term investments at June 2026 and generated $50.6 million in investment income during the first half.
These earnings are significant, although returns on short-term investments may change as interest rates move.
Deposits can also provide a funding advantage for appropriately licensed institutions, depending on the interest paid to customers and the restrictions governing their use.
Customer deposits remain liabilities owed to depositors. They cannot simply be treated as the institution’s own capital.
FairMoney offers another example of how funding arrangements can evolve.
It began primarily as a digital lender before expanding its banking and deposit-taking operations.
Its reported 2024 profit after tax reached ₦7.9 billion — approximately $5 million using a rounded ₦1,600/$ — with customer deposits funding around 56% of its loan book.
This illustrates how a lending business can reduce dependence on more expensive external borrowing by developing an appropriate deposit franchise.
But there is another approach, already visible within OPay itself.
In Indonesia, OPay earns fees from facilitating loans funded by third-party financing providers, including banks.
That business generated approximately $41.6 million in revenue during H1 2026.
OPay helps match borrowers with lenders and provides services such as account maintenance, collections and payment processing. The funding partners act as lenders.
The distinction is important.
A platform can earn money by financing customers directly, carrying the associated funding and credit exposure.
It can also earn fees by helping other institutions reach borrowers and administer financing relationships.
In the second model, the platform’s distribution, information and servicing capabilities become services that outside capital providers can purchase.
OPay excludes Indonesia from certain operating metrics because the nature of that business differs significantly from its other markets.
Its Indonesian operations should therefore be assessed separately from its Nigerian lending business.
Nevertheless, the two models demonstrate something important within the same corporate group.
A financial platform can create value both by supplying capital and by making it easier for other institutions to deploy theirs.
From investing in fintechs to financing their assets
International institutional investors already have one route into these businesses: corporate equity.
When an investor buys shares in OPay or Moniepoint, it acquires an interest in the company’s overall performance.
That includes the value generated through payments, lending, customer relationships and other activities.
It does not mean the investor owns individual loans to Nigerian merchants.
Nor does every share purchase inject fresh money into the company. A primary share issuance raises capital for the business; a purchase from an existing shareholder generally pays the seller.
OPay’s proposed listing makes this distinction particularly relevant.
Its IPO filing describes a concurrent, conditional investment by Stanbic Africa Holdings, part of Standard Bank Group, involving a primary share subscription of up to $200 million, subject to specified limits and approvals.
If completed, that would provide new equity capital to OPay itself.
It is a tangible illustration of institutional capital entering a business whose earnings are closely connected to financial services in markets such as Nigeria.
But equity ownership is only one layer of the opportunity.
Consider a fintech that has spent several years originating thousands of merchant loans.
It now has records showing which borrowers repay, how quickly they repay, what proportion default and how collections perform during difficult periods.
A bank or investment fund could potentially use that information to assess a defined pool of loans.
Instead of buying shares in the fintech, it might provide financing secured against qualifying receivables.
As borrowers repay, the facility can be replenished to finance new loans. This is commonly called a warehouse facility.
Alternatively, an investor might agree to purchase qualifying loans as they are originated, an arrangement known as forward-flow financing.
With sufficient scale and reliable performance, a pool of receivables could eventually support securitisation: issuing investment securities backed by the expected repayments from those assets.
This is already more than a theoretical possibility in Nigeria.
In January 2024, Nigerian law firm Balogun Harold reported advising a venture-backed fintech on a $60 million securitisation of vehicle-loan receivables. The firm’s announcement did not identify the client, but described a structure intended to release capital for further vehicle financing.
It is a useful precedent for the broader mechanism.
The commercial appeal is straightforward.
A fintech that can identify customers, originate suitable financing and collect repayments effectively may not need to provide every dollar of funding itself.
Outside institutions can supply some of the capital, allowing the originator to finance more customers without expanding its own balance sheet proportionately.
For investors, the attraction is exposure to defined financial assets whose expected returns can be assessed separately from the value of the originating company.
But the legal and operational details determine whether such arrangements work.
Who owns the receivables? Can they be transferred or pledged? If the fintech fails, who collects repayments? Who bears the first losses?
Currency is another important consideration.
A portfolio of naira-denominated receivables may generate attractive returns locally while producing disappointing dollar returns after depreciation.
That risk must be priced, hedged or accepted by investors.
Domestic pension funds, insurers, banks and other local-currency investors may therefore be particularly relevant participants, alongside international credit funds and development finance institutions.
And the opportunity need not be confined to loan portfolios.
Appropriately structured trade receivables, equipment leases and other contractual payment claims may also support institutional financing.
The underlying requirements remain familiar: reliable cash flows, enforceable rights, sound servicing and a return sufficient to compensate investors for the risks they assume.
What this could mean for African capital markets
The implications extend beyond fintech valuations.
Institutional investors seeking exposure to African economies have traditionally relied on a relatively limited range of accessible instruments: sovereign debt, listed equities, large corporate financing, private equity and selected infrastructure investments.
Meanwhile, enormous volumes of everyday commercial activity take place among smaller businesses and households that are difficult to reach through those channels.
Digital financial platforms could gradually expand the available opportunities.
They can aggregate fragmented activity, develop financial records and support financing relationships that create identifiable claims to future payments.
Those claims can potentially be evaluated, pooled and financed by institutions that would struggle to assess thousands of individual borrowers themselves.
There is also an opportunity for specialist businesses providing the surrounding infrastructure: underwriting, servicing, collections, guarantees, portfolio management and investment structuring.
Some platforms may ultimately earn substantial revenue by enabling third-party financing, without having to fund every transaction themselves.
The potential market also extends beyond acquiring more users.
A customer already using a platform for payments may become commercially viable for savings, working-capital finance, insurance or other products.
Better information and lower servicing costs may also make it economical to serve customers who previously fell outside a financier’s acceptable risk or cost parameters.
The addressable market is therefore determined by economic activity, financial needs, affordability and the cost of providing suitable services.
Population size alone is an inadequate measure.
And as more commercially viable financial relationships develop, the potential supply of assets available for institutional financing could grow alongside them.
The larger significance of OPay’s profit
Return to our Lagos trader.
A business that once operated largely outside conventional financial records begins receiving digital payments.
Those transactions create a history of commercial activity.
A financier uses that information, alongside other evidence, to provide working capital, inventory finance or another suitable product.
The resulting arrangement creates contractual rights to future payments or other economic returns.
As similar arrangements accumulate and establish reliable performance histories, other financial institutions may become willing to finance or acquire those rights.
The trader continues operating in Lagos.
Yet some of the capital supporting that business could ultimately come from a Nigerian pension fund, an African bank or an international investment institution.
The connection is created by the businesses and financial structures that make the underlying activity easier to observe, assess and finance.
This is why OPay’s IPO filing matters.
Its $90.9 million half-year profit demonstrates the commercial potential of serving these markets at scale. Moniepoint’s merchant-led expansion provides another example. OPay’s Indonesian loan-facilitation business shows how a platform can participate in financing without necessarily providing all the capital itself.
The proposed institutional investment in OPay, alongside emerging examples of receivables-backed financing, illustrates different ways capital can enter this ecosystem.
The next stage could involve increasingly financing the assets these platforms originate, alongside investing in the companies themselves.
Africa’s informal economy has never lacked economic activity. The opportunity is to develop the information, institutions and financial structures that allow more of that activity to be financed efficiently.
OPay’s profitability suggests that building those connections can already be a substantial business. The longer-term opportunity may be the capital markets that grow around them.
Sources: OPay Limited, Form F-1, filed 9 October 2026; Moniepoint, 2025 Year in Review; FairMoney 2024 results, reported by TechCabal; Balogun Harold, receivables securitisation announcement. Naira-to-dollar conversions are illustrative, using rounded historical rates rather than transaction-date exchange rates.
There is a fundamental portion of this story that may not survive for long. OPay lending is usurious - 10 to 13% monthly. There is no part where a person or business that is not desperate will take those terms but with the multidimensional poverty in Nigeria, there are a lot of desperate businesses and people. CBN has forced them all to become MFBs and MFBs interest rates are capped. What happens when CBN and FCCPC cracks down?