South Africa’s Standard Bank Group is in talks to acquire a stake in Nigerian fintech giant OPay Digital Services ahead of the company’s planned initial public offering (IPO) in the United States.
The potential investment would give Standard Bank a foothold in one of Africa’s fastest-growing digital payments companies before OPay attempts to enter the public markets, potentially valuing the fintech at about $4 billion.
Bloomberg disclosed the development on Tuesday, August 18, citing people familiar with the discussions who asked not to be identified because the information is private.
Standard Bank’s potential OPay investment
OPay has not commented on the reported discussions, while Standard Bank said it does not comment on market speculation.
The two companies have not reached an agreement, Bloomberg reported, and there is no guarantee that the proposed transaction will ultimately be completed.
Also, TechMedia Africa could not independently verify the size of Standard Bank’s potential investment and the percentage stake it is seeking.
The disclosure comes less than a week after TechMedia Africa reported that Standard Bank spent R11.83 billion on technology in the first six months of 2026 as the bank continued expanding its use of cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and digital banking services.
If concluded, however, the transaction would give Standard Bank exposure to a rapidly scaling payments platform at a potentially important point in its growth journey.
For OPay, securing a major African banking institution as a pre-IPO investor could strengthen its financial position and potentially provide additional capital and institutional credibility as it prepares to approach global investors.
For its Nigerian users, the significance would depend largely on how any fresh capital is deployed. OPay could potentially use additional funding to deepen its payments infrastructure, expand financial services, improve transaction reliability.
Why Nigeria matters to OPay
In May, Bloomberg disclosed that OPay was planning a US initial public offering targeting a valuation of approximately $4 billion, with Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase appointed to manage the offering. The share sale is expected to take place later this year.
While the planned IPO in the New York Stock Exchange, expected later this year, has sparked reactions among Nigerians, OPay’s rapid expansion across Africa and other emerging markets has not diminished the importance of Nigeria to its business.
- The country accounted for 88.1 percent of OPay’s $536.25 million revenue in 2025, far ahead of Indonesia at 9.9 percent, Egypt at 1.6 percent and other markets at 0.4 percent, making Nigeria the fintech’s overwhelmingly dominant revenue engine.
The company’s strong performance in its core market also helps explain growing investor interest ahead of its proposed US IPO. OPay swung from a $50.98 million net loss in 2024 to a $72.47 million net profit in 2025, while revenue jumped 161 percent year-on-year, driven by surging transaction volumes, user growth and its expanding lending business.
- Its payments business recorded even more striking growth, with gross transaction value more than doubling from $166.2 billion in 2024 to $358 billion in 2025. Meanwhile, monthly active users climbed 57 percent from 25.1 million to 39.3 million, while daily active users in the fourth quarter rose 50 percent to 22.7 million.
OPay’s Nigerian operation is backed by its licences as a Mobile Money Operator and Microfinance Bank, enabling it to provide transfers, payments, savings, credit and other financial services to a vast and increasingly digital customer base.
That scale means any new investment, including the potential Standard Bank deal, could have implications beyond OPay’s balance sheet.
Additional institutional capital could help the fintech strengthen its payment infrastructure, expand its financial products and improve the reliability of services used by millions of Nigerians. At the same time, greater investor scrutiny and pressure to sustain its newly achieved profitability could influence how OPay prices its services, expands its products and manages its rapidly growing operations.
With Nigeria generating nearly nine-tenths of its revenue, OPay’s growth story remains, in many ways, a story about the accelerating digitisation of Nigeria’s financial system.
The US IPO has sparked a listing debate in Nigeria
OPay’s decision to pursue a US listing has also triggered a broader debate over where African technology companies that generate substantial local revenue should list.
Some Nigerian investors and market participants have questioned why OPay would seek a foreign listing when Nigeria is responsible for the vast majority of its revenue.
That debate gained fresh momentum last week when NGX Group CEO Temi Popoola called on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to support policies encouraging major high-growth fintech companies operating in Nigeria to list on the domestic exchange.
“Mr. President, I bring to your attention something that we’re seeing happen recently that we could do with some support, which is an idea of companies that do business in Nigeria. They earn a lot of their profits in Nigeria, but they take that wealth abroad to list on other exchanges,” he said.
Popoola argued that allowing local investors to participate in the growth of companies generating substantial revenue from Nigeria would help ensure that more of the wealth created by the country’s technology sector remains accessible to domestic investors.
“It’s a free market, but we should also allow locals to participate in the wealth that these companies are creating. Some of these fintechs are considering listings abroad,” he added.
Recall that it was previously speculated that Flutterwave, one of Nigeria’s unicorns, was planning to list on the Nigerian Exchange, with the Nigerian government reportedly considering investing $75 million in the company as part of the IPO, according to a post made by Dada Olusegun, Special Assistant to President Bola Tinubu, on April 20. However, the payment company, valued at over $3 billion, denied the claim, stating: “Flutterwave is not in any way close to an IPO.”