OPay pulled its $304M New York listing hours after pricing it, ending the most anticipated African fintech IPO in years with an underwriting termination instead of a bell.
The Nigerian payments company had sold 16 million American depositary shares at $19, the floor of its marketed range, implying a valuation near $4B. Banks on the ticket, among them Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Standard Bank and CICC, agreed to scrap the agreement after a regulatory inquiry surfaced in a jurisdiction OPay described as immaterial but declined to name.
The silence is what unsettles investors. OPay operates in Nigeria, Egypt, Indonesia and Pakistan, and its founder Yahui Zhou holds interests across several more markets, so an unidentified regulator is a sizeable hole in a $4B story.
The financials were not the problem. OPay swung from a $50.8M loss in 2024 to a $72.5M profit in 2025, and first-half 2026 revenue doubled to $467.1M with net income near $90.9M.
The mix was harder to sell. Just over half of those first-half revenues, roughly $236M, came from loan financing rather than the payments business OPay advertises, funded by a book that originated $927.6M of fresh loans in six months. Write-offs start after 120 days, far quicker than the Nigerian banking norm, implying heavy capital recycling.
Currency compounds it: almost all revenue is earned in naira that has been repeatedly devalued but reported in dollars, with Nigeria supplying 89.5% of first-half sales.
The collapse also strands Stanbic’s arrangement to buy up to $200M of shares on listing, and a planned secondary line on the Nigerian Exchange.
