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Hello fintech friends,
New York, we have a problem.
On Friday, OPay priced a $304 million IPO at $19 a share, valuing the company at about $4 billion, and was set to open on the NYSE under the ticker OPAY. Then the screen flashed “trading halt, news pending.” The shares never traded.
The explanation came a day later. OPay and its underwriters terminated the underwriting agreement, citing a regulatory inquiry in an unnamed foreign jurisdiction that OPay calls “immaterial” to its core business. Apollo 13 at least knew which part broke. OPay has not named the regulator, the country, or what the inquiry is about.
The IPO, meanwhile, was very material.
Look at what OPay actually is. In the first half of 2026, lending brought in half of its $467 million revenue. Payments brought in 28%. The payments app is the front door, and the lender is the business.
The lender is growing fast. New Nigerian loans tripled to $928 million, and 27.4% of the $415 million loan book was past due, though that is down from 34.2% at the end of 2025. OPay set aside $118 million for credit losses, more than its $91 million profit, and wrote off $113 million in six months against $70 million in all of 2025. And Nigeria is almost 90% of revenue.
That’s why the timing hurt. Indicated opening prices sat below the $19 offer, and Standard Bank’s up-to-$200 million investment was conditional on the IPO closing. It falls away too.
OPay says the inquiry says nothing about its business and expects it resolved soon. Until it is, OPAY is a ticker with nothing to trade.
Apollo 13 made it home. OPay is still waiting on its landing clearance.
— Jovin
Please find another week of fintech news below:
The Rundown
🚀 Product Launches
Bluebulb launched Orbita, a new treasury platform for managing business cash.
LOOP DFS launched LOOP BIZ+, a business plan priced at about $11.50 per month.
Grey launched Paycheck, a new product that pays 3% interest.
Fynbos Money launched a read only integration with ChatGPT and Claude, alongside its first mobile app.
VitalSwap added smaller remittances, a Nigeria corridor through Veem, and 0.8% stablecoin checkout.
Airtel Money Uganda launched Kwaata Sente with Centenary Bank and gnuGrid, starting from about $2.35.
TPC Africa launched a prepaid mobile service on MTN, with bundles starting from about $0.09.
Mastercard and Interswitch launched Google Pay for eligible Mastercard cardholders in Nigeria, using tokenised payments.
EBANX became the first international provider for OPay Direct Debit, which reaches 40 million monthly users.
Raenest added USDC and USDT, a physical card, and vaults paying up to 16% APY on naira.
Luno added MoneyHash orchestration and recovered one in four deposits.
💸 Fundraises
🗂️ Other News
OPay’s $304 million NYSE IPO, priced at $19, collapsed before trading when the underwriting agreement was terminated over a foreign regulatory inquiry.
Moniepoint cut engineering and product roles, offering voluntary exits first and creating new platform architect positions.
MTN Nigeria reported fintech revenue fell 25.9% to about $73.4 million after an airtime credit pause, while MoMo revenue grew 102.2%.
Verve outlined a five-phase roadmap at Moonshot, with wearables in phase two and agentic AI payments in phase five.
Kenyan banks and fintechs added 16% VAT to payment fees under the Finance Act 2026, while M-Pesa and Airtel Money P2P stayed exempt.
NITDA found only 59% of 44 surveyed firms were ready for the CBN’s Jan. 1, 2027 data localisation deadline.
Interswitch pushed tokenised payments with Verve, GTBank, Wema and ProvidusUnity banks.
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Quote of the Week
“What we’ve seen is you cannot provide a great payment experience if you don’t control the entire stack, or at least a big piece of the stack, and in most of those large stacks, it’s easy to source a third party who does not share the same level of focus that you have. We chose to do banking to create more depth for our customers.”
Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, cofounder and CEO of Flutterwave
Paying attention?
How many staff did Safaricom fire for fraud in the year to March 2026?
a) 108 b) 113 c) 118At what price per share did OPay price its NYSE IPO before it collapsed?
a) $19 b) $24 c) $14Raenest’s new vaults pay up to what APY on naira?
a) 8% b) 16% c) 24%
(The answers are in the closing remarks.)
Editor’s Picks
That’s all for today, friends. See you next Monday.
Asante.
Quiz answers: 1 (c) 118, 2 (a) $19, 3 (b) 16%.
