OPay built its following through a different fashion, by showing up where the banks weren't, charging less than everyone else, and making transfers work when nothing else did.

Fifty million users later and counting, it is heading to Wall Street, and the most important question is not what that means for Nigerian tech. It is what it means for the people sending money on the app every day.

The SoftBank-backed Nigerian fintech has hired Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan Chase to lead a United States (US) Initial Public Offering (IPO) targeting a $4 billion valuation, double what the company was worth in 2021.

The listing could happen sooner than you expect, but before the headline number gets too much attention, the origin story is worth understanding, because it explains exactly what kind of company is about to go public, and what it has historically asked of its users in return.

OPay launched in Nigeria in 2018, initially as a logistics and ride-hailing business. Green okada motorcycles were everywhere in Lagos before the state government banned commercial motorcycles in 2020.

When that ban landed, the company pivoted fast. It shut down the logistics arms and redirected everything into financial services and agent banking. That pivot turned out to be the right call. OPay filled the gap that traditional banks kept creating through downtime, queues, and ₦50 transfer charges.

It built an agent network of over 500,000 operators across Nigeria, priced its services cheaply enough to attract millions of users who had written the banks off, and grew from there.

Opay Full-year revenue in 2025 came in at $614.8 million, up 28% year-on-year, processing roughly $12 billion in monthly transactions. That is what it is taking to Wall Street.

Who Else Is Watching This IPO and Why the Pressure to List Is Coming From More Than One Direction

Opera, the Norwegian browser company that incubated OPay in 2018, still holds a 9.5% stake in the fintech, valued at $294.6 million on Opera's balance sheet at the end of 2025.

That valuation increased by $36.3 million over the year, and that gain flowed directly into Opera's income statement as a fair value gain. Opera's full-year 2025 net income was $108.3 million. Remove the OPay gain, and that figure falls to roughly $72 million, closer to 2024 levels than the 34% growth Opera reported.

In other words, OPay's rising paper valuation is currently one of the things making Opera look like a fast-growing company to its own investors.

Opera's own filings acknowledge the problem, warning investors that OPay's fair value is highly uncertain and could create material volatility in results. The longer OPay stays private, the more unstable that line on Opera's balance sheet becomes.

So when you see a $4 billion valuation target, understand that the pressure behind it is not coming only from SoftBank and OPay's own management. It is coming from a listed company in Oslo whose annual results now partly depend on what OPay is worth. The IPO is not just OPay's exit. It is Opera's too.

Will OPay Still Keep Fees Low After Listing?

This is the most immediate question for ordinary users, and the honest answer is that nobody knows yet, OPay has not said anything either way. What is known is that going public creates structural pressure that private companies do not face.

Once listed, OPay will report quarterly earnings to analysts and institutional investors who will be watching revenue per user, margin expansion, and growth trajectory. If those numbers disappoint, the share price falls. The easiest lever to pull when you need to grow revenue is to charge existing users a little more for what they already use.

There are signs this may already be happening quietly. According to Technext24, User reviews on OPay's business app in recent months show a pattern of complaints about fees. One reviewer noted that Value Added Tax (VAT) is now being charged at every transaction rather than once per day for amounts above ₦10,000.

OPay has made no formal announcement about fee changes. But the pattern raises a reasonable question about whether the shift started before the IPO was even announced.

The competitive reality offers some protection. PalmPay, Moniepoint, Kuda, and the banks themselves are all fighting for the same customers. OPay knows its user base is price-sensitive and that people can move.

That natural restraint cannot be fully overridden by public market pressure, but it does not eliminate the pressure either. The question is whether the company can find a middle ground between satisfying Wall Street and keeping users from walking toward the door.

What Happens When Your Transaction Data Becomes a Public Document

Once OPay files its IPO prospectus with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), it will have to disclose things it has never disclosed publicly before, how many users are genuinely active versus just registered, what its revenue per user looks like, and how much of its business comes from lending, which depends heavily on analysing user behaviour.

It will also have to describe how it handles user data, because US securities law requires companies to disclose material risks to investors, and data handling is a material risk for any fintech processing billions of dollars in transactions.

OPay knows a great deal about its users. It knows when you get paid and roughly how much. It knows which billers you pay, whether you save consistently, and if you have ever taken a loan through the platform and how reliably you repaid it.

The question is what happens to that data as the company transitions from a growth-focused private startup to a listed company that needs to show investors a clear path to monetisation.

Will it use that data to build better, cheaper products? Or will it sell access to lenders, insurers, and advertisers as a revenue line? Those are questions worth asking, and there is no public answer to that yet.

A listed OPay would be more transparent, more accountable to regulators in two jurisdictions, and under more public scrutiny than it has ever been. For a company handling the savings and transfers of tens of millions of Nigerians, that accountability is arguably overdue.

But there is also a version in which going public changes what OPay is optimising for, and users will feel it gradually, in ways that are hard to trace to any single decision. Which version plays out depends on choices OPay has not made publicly yet. The more important question is whether its users will be paying close enough attention to notice when it does.