If OPay Is Going Public, Nigeria Should Be on the Ticket

Shola Akande

If Bloomberg’s reporting proves correct, OPay could ring a bell in New York before the end of the year. The payments company, built on Nigerian consumers, Nigerian agents and Nigerian transactions, has reportedly engaged Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan for a potential United States listing targeting a valuation of around $4 billion.

That would be good news. It would be a powerful validation of what many of us have argued for years: Nigeria can produce businesses capable of competing for global capital at the highest level.

Nobody should begrudge OPay the deep capital pools, analyst coverage and international visibility that a New York listing can provide. Those advantages are real. But they should prompt a second question, rather than close the conversation.

Why not both?

A dual listing, New York for global capital and Lagos for the home market, is not a sentimental proposition. It is a commercial one. And the case rests on four things: customers, domestic liquidity, precedent and alignment.

The first is the customer.

OPay’s reported tens of millions of users are overwhelmingly Nigerian. They are the traders, artisans, students, small businesses and salary earners whose transactions helped build the franchise. A secondary listing on the Nigerian Exchange would give some of those customers the opportunity to become shareholders, converting economic participation into ownership.

Nigeria has already seen what happens when a major consumer-facing company deliberately broadens domestic ownership. MTN Nigeria’s public offer attracted more than 126,000 retail investors and created tens of thousands of new market accounts. The lesson is not that every shareholder becomes a brand ambassador. It is that a strong Nigerian consumer franchise can generate substantial domestic investor interest.

The second is liquidity.

Nigeria’s capital market is not the market it was a few years ago. The banking recapitalisation has demonstrated the depth of domestic institutional capital, while pension assets have continued to expand. The Exchange now has dedicated indices designed to support institutional investment, including the NGX Pension and NGX Pension Broad indices. 

That matters because the argument for Lagos is no longer simply that Nigerians would like to own OPay. There is a potentially meaningful pool of domestic capital that could actually buy it.

Nigeria’s market infrastructure has also moved forward. The shift to T+1 settlement brought the equities settlement cycle in line with foreign markets including New York, reducing one important source of operational friction for international investors.

A Lagos listing would also give OPay access to naira-denominated demand and, depending on its eventual size and index eligibility, potentially broaden institutional demand through relevant domestic benchmarks. That is not a substitute for New York’s deeper pools of global capital. It is an additional source of liquidity and ownership.

The third is precedent. This road has been walked before.

Seplat has maintained a Lagos and London dual listing since 2014. Airtel Africa listed in London and subsequently in Lagos in 2019. Both demonstrated that a company can use an international market for global capital and visibility while retaining a meaningful connection to its home market.

The point is not that OPay should copy either company. It is that the supposed choice between international capital and domestic ownership is not a choice at all. The two can coexist.

The fourth is alignment.

OPay operates within Nigeria’s regulated payments ecosystem. The Central Bank of Nigeria lists OPay Digital Services as a licensed mobile money operator, while the Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation lists it among insured mobile money operators. Its regulatory relationships, agent network and core customer base are deeply Nigerian. That creates a natural commercial argument for maintaining a visible presence in the country’s capital market.

But there is an important concession to make.

New York may well be the right primary market for OPay.

A company seeking a multibillion-dollar valuation may reasonably conclude that New York offers the deepest pool of fintech investors, the strongest international analyst coverage, the broadest universe of comparable companies and the most efficient access to global capital. If that is the conclusion, it should not be treated as a failure of the Nigerian market.

It should simply make the case for Lagos more precise.

Lagos does not need to beat New York. It needs to complement it.

A secondary Nigerian listing would allow OPay to establish a domestic ownership base without sacrificing the advantages of its international listing. New York could serve as the primary venue for global price discovery and international liquidity; Lagos could provide local institutional participation, retail ownership and a direct connection to the market in which much of the company’s economic story was created.

The two markets are complements, not competitors.

Some will argue that a dual listing creates additional compliance costs and administrative complexity. That is true. But it is precisely why the Nigerian market must continue making itself easier to access and operate in. Faster settlement, better market infrastructure, more efficient foreign-exchange processes and broader institutional participation are not cosmetic reforms. They determine whether companies view a domestic listing as a commercial decision or a patriotic sacrifice.

That distinction matters.

Because there is a bigger issue here than OPay’s eventual cap table.

Nigeria is entering a period in which some of its most successful businesses may begin contemplating the public markets. If the pattern becomes that our strongest companies build much of their scale here but list and raise their most consequential capital elsewhere, Nigeria risks exporting not just companies, but the wealth-creation opportunities attached to them.

The answer is not to compel companies to list at home. Nor is it to complain when founders and investors choose the markets that best serve their interests.

The answer is to make Nigeria’s capital market so competitive that listing here becomes the rational commercial choice.

Much of that work is already underway.

That is why OPay’s potential listing presents an opportunity beyond one company. It can become a test of whether Nigeria is prepared to capture more of the value created by the businesses emerging from its economy.

And it can set a precedent for the generation of Nigerian fintechs behind it: Moniepoint, Flutterwave and others that may eventually face similar decisions about accessing the public markets.

So this is not a criticism of OPay. It is an invitation to think bigger about what a successful public-market debut could look like.

Ring the bell in New York by all means, but there is a compelling case for ringing one in Lagos too.

The market is ready. The capital is waiting. And millions of Nigerians who already use the platform every day should have the opportunity, if they choose, to become owners of the company they helped build.

That would not be madness.

That would be the whole point.

* Akande, an economist, writes from Lagos