OPay is going to Wall Street: what does that mean for your transaction fees?

OPay is heading to Wall Street. The Nigerian fintech giant backed by SoftBank has hired Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan Chase to lead a US IPO that could happen before the end of 2026, targeting a $4 billion valuation, double what the company was worth in 2021.

It is a big moment for Nigerian tech. But for the 50 million people who use the fintech app to send money, pay bills, and save, the more pressing question is a simpler one: what changes for me?

Let us start with how it got here, because the origin story matters.

The company launched in Nigeria in 2018, founded by Chinese billionaire Yahui Zhou, the same person behind Opera browser.

Opay POS agent

It started with okadas, those green OPay motorcycles that were everywhere in Lagos before the state government banned commercial motorcycles in 2020. When that happened, OPay pivoted fast, shut down the logistics arms, and poured everything into financial services and agent banking.

That bet paid off. OPay filled a gap the traditional banks kept creating with their downtime, queues, and ₦50 charges per transfer. It built a massive agent network, developed products that actually worked, and priced everything cheaply enough that millions of Nigerians who had given up on the banks gave OPay a chance instead.

Today, the company has over 50 million users, processes roughly $12 billion in monthly transactions, and operates more than 500,000 agents across Nigeria. Full-year 2025 revenue was $614.8 million, up 28% year-on-year. This is what OPay is taking to Wall Street investors to price at $4 billion.

Now it wants to go public. And before we get to what that means for ordinary users, it is worth understanding who else has skin in this game and why.

Opera, the Norwegian browser company that incubated OPay in 2018, still holds a 9.5% stake in the fintech. That stake sits on Opera’s balance sheet as a named line item, valued at $294.6 million at the end of 2025, up from $258.3 million a year earlier.

Read also: Nigerian fintechs are burning millions to acquire customers; And the math doesn’t add up

That $36.3 million revaluation flowed directly into Opera’s income statement as a fair value gain, and it is not a small contribution.

Opera’s full-year 2025 net income was $108.3 million. Strip out the OPay fair value gain, and that figure falls to roughly $72 million, closer to what Opera earned in 2024 than the 34% growth it reported.

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

That creates a specific kind of urgency. Opera needs OPay to list so it can convert a paper gain into real, bankable cash. The longer OPay stays private, the more volatile that line on Opera’s balance sheet becomes, and Opera’s own filings acknowledge as much, warning investors that OPay’s fair value is highly uncertain and could create material volatility in results.

So, when you read that OPay is targeting a $4 billion valuation, understand that the pressure to hit that number 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?

This is the most immediate question for ordinary users.

OPay built its following partly on cheap and sometimes zero-fee transfers at a time when the banks were charging more. Free transfers were a growth strategy, a way to pull users away from the competition fast. It worked.

But can that strategy survive a public listing?

The honest answer is that nobody knows for certain, and OPay has not said anything either way. What we do know is that going public creates structural pressure that private companies simply do not face.

Once OPay lists, it will report earnings every quarter to analysts and institutional investors who will be looking at revenue per user, margin expansion, and growth trajectory. If those numbers disappoint, the share price falls, and executives answer for it.

The easiest lever to pull when you need to grow revenue is to charge your existing users a little more for what they already use.

Some of that may already be happening quietly. User reviews on OPay's business app in recent months show a pattern of complaints about fees, with one reviewer noting that VAT is now being charged at every transaction rather than once per day for amounts above ₦10,000.

Another flagged charge appears on OPay-to-OPay transfers that were previously free. OPay has not made any formal announcement about fee changes. But it is worth asking whether the shift started before the IPO was even announced.

On the other side of this question: OPay knows its user base is price-sensitive. Nigeria is a competitive market. PalmPay, Moniepoint, Kuda, and the banks themselves are all fighting for the same customers.

If it raises fees aggressively, users can and will move. That competitive reality is a natural restraint that even pressure from public companies cannot fully override. The question is whether the fintech startup can find the middle ground where it satisfies Wall Street without pushing users toward the door.

What happens when your transaction data becomes a public document?

When OPay files its IPO prospectus with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, it will have to disclose things it has never disclosed publicly before.

• How many of its users are genuinely active versus just registered.
• What its revenue per user looks like.
• How much of its business comes from lending, which depends heavily on analysing user behaviour to decide who gets credit and at what rate.
• 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.

Read also: Nigeria’s fintech paradox: 11bn transactions, system failures, lingering trust issues – CBN report

OPay knows a lot 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 paid it back.

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

Will it use that data to build better, cheaper products? Or will it sell access to lenders, insurers, and advertisers as a revenue line? Will it do both?

There is a version of this IPO story that is genuinely positive for users. A listed OPay would be more transparent, more accountable to regulators in two jurisdictions, and under more public scrutiny than it has ever been.

Its financials would be readable by anyone. For a company handling the savings and transfers of tens of millions of Nigerians, that level of transparency is arguably overdue. But there is also a version in which going public changes what OPay is optimising for, and users feel it gradually, in ways that are hard to pin on any single decision.

A small fee here, a new data-sharing agreement there, a savings rate that quietly edges down. None of it dramatic enough to drive users away, but all of it adding up.

Which version plays out depends on decisions OPay has not made publicly yet, and on whether its users are paying close enough attention to hold it accountable when they do.

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