OPay’s New York IPO: priced on Friday, pulled the same day
OPay, the Nigerian mobile-money and payments app used by tens of millions of people, was due to start trading in New York on Friday 30 October. Its shares never did. Hours after pricing its $304 million initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), the company withdrew it, citing a regulatory inquiry in a foreign country it has not named.
OPay says its business is unaffected. But the episode leaves the deal, a planned second listing in Lagos and the wider hopes for African tech listings abroad all in limbo.
How the day unfolded
- 9 October: OPay files its prospectus with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
- 23 October: It sets a price range of $19 to $21 per share. Stanbic Africa Holdings, part of South Africa’s Standard Bank Group, agrees to buy up to $200 million of new shares in a separate private placement that depends on the IPO going ahead, Techpoint Africa reported.
- 27 October: The NYSE approves the shares for listing under the ticker OPAY.
- 30 October, morning: OPay prices 16 million American depositary shares at $19, the bottom of its range, valuing the company at about $4 billion. Executives ring the opening bell.
- 30 October, later: The exchange halts the stock pending news. OPay and its underwriters, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Standard Bank and China’s CICC, terminate the deal before a single share changes hands.
What OPay has said
In a statement carried by Reuters, the company described the jurisdiction behind the inquiry as “immaterial” to its core operations and said it expected the matter to be resolved satisfactorily in the near future. It said the withdrawal “should not be misconstrued as a reflection on the Company’s business performance”, and that its operations, regulatory standing and customer service in Nigeria and its other markets were unaffected.
It has not named the regulator, explained what the inquiry is about, or said when it might try again. SoftBank, whose entities held 6.6 percent of OPay before the offering, did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment. None of the reports we reviewed carried comment from Nigerian regulators.
A business that is growing fast
The cancelled listing is not about weak numbers. According to its filings:
- Revenue in the first half of 2026 was $467.1 million, up 136 percent on a year earlier, with lending a growing share. Nigeria provided 89.5 percent of it.
- Profit for the same six months was $90.9 million, against $21.7 million a year before.
- Users: about 50 million people used the app each month as of 31 July. The value of transactions on the platform more than doubled in 2025, to $358 billion.
Founded in 2018 by Chinese entrepreneur Yahui Zhou, OPay also operates in Egypt, Indonesia and Pakistan. It last raised money in 2021, at a $2 billion valuation, so the IPO price would have roughly doubled that.
What it means for Nigerian investors
OPay’s board had approved a secondary listing on the Nigerian Exchange (NGX) after the New York debut, giving local investors a way to own a piece of a company many of them use every day. With the primary listing off, the timing and shape of that plan are now uncertain, Daba Finance noted.
The timing is awkward. Days earlier, the Dangote refinery’s share sale closed with $1.5 billion to $1.6 billion in funded orders from investors in 119 countries, Daba Finance reported, a sign of strong appetite for big Nigerian companies at home. Reuters also notes that many companies worldwide have delayed listings in recent weeks amid stubborn inflation and a sell-off in AI-related stocks.
What happens next
The key questions are whether OPay names the regulator and the issue, how quickly the inquiry is settled, and whether the company refiles in New York or turns to Lagos first. The answer will be watched closely by other African fintechs weighing a listing abroad.
Sources: Reuters via Central Oregon Daily, 30 October; Techpoint Africa; Nairametrics, 30 October; Daba Finance, 2 November; The Condia, 10 October; Nigeria CommunicationsWeek, 1 November.
Top photo: The New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street (illustrative file photo). Photo: Arild Vågen, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
