OPay's $185 Million Standard Bank Deal Hangs on a Collapsed IPO

Standard Bank Group agreed to pour roughly $185 million into OPay on October 9 — and three weeks later, the deal's central condition fell apart when OPay pulled its New York Stock Exchange listing.

The investment from Africa's largest bank by assets was explicitly conditional on two things: the successful completion of OPay's planned IPO and the receipt of applicable regulatory approvals. On October 30, the fintech withdrew its NYSE listing after a reported regulatory inquiry from China, according to Bloomberg.

What does this change for OPay? It puts at risk the partnership that was supposed to solve the company's biggest structural problem: 89.5% of its revenue comes from Nigeria alone, even though the SoftBank-backed platform also operates in Indonesia, Egypt and Pakistan.

Why OPay needed Standard Bank in the first place

OPay has built a financial services platform that moves money, extends credit and helps millions of people save. It serves over 50.1 million monthly active users with digital payments, savings, consumer lending and merchant financial services. But becoming a pan-African business requires more than deploying an app in a new country — it requires banking infrastructure, regulatory relationships, local partnerships and access to payment networks.

The company's own playbook, described in its SEC prospectus, is to enter with a focused solution and expand from there. "We may enter with a focused solution to a local pain point and then broaden over time. Our Nigeria playbook of serving consumers and merchants across payments, digital banking, and credit is what we will look to replicate," OPay said.

It has also used acquisitions to break into new markets. In Nigeria, a consortium led by founder Zhou Yahui acquired a controlling stake in mobile-money operator Paycom in 2018. In Pakistan, OPay bought electronic-money institution Finja in 2023.

But every African market has different licensing requirements, banking systems and payment networks. Buying a local fintech doesn't solve that. Standard Bank, which operates across 21 African markets, offered a shortcut: established regulator relationships, local knowledge and banking infrastructure that could compress OPay's time-to-market.

"We are currently evaluating opportunities in markets across Africa and believe the Standard Bank Collaboration, if implemented, could strengthen this approach by bringing complementary products, local market knowledge, regulatory expertise and banking infrastructure across its African footprint, helping us enter and scale more efficiently," OPay said.

Where the growth opportunity actually sits

OPay targets markets where digital payments remain underpenetrated and it can secure a banking license or work through appropriately licensed partners. "We intend to expand into new markets where we see clear unmet need and a path to build the full OPay model," the company noted in its prospectus.

Several markets inside Standard Bank's footprint fit that profile — Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Mozambique and Zambia. The adoption gaps are striking. According to GSMA, the global industry body for mobile operators, only 19.2% of adults in Zambia and 18.5% in Mozambique made digital merchant payments in 2024. Ghana's figure was 27.3% — meaning roughly three in four adults in these markets still pay merchants in cash.

Those gaps represent the consumer and merchant relationships a payments platform can build from scratch, and Standard Bank's local presence could have cut the institutional friction of entering them.

The product play beyond payments

The collaboration also promised OPay a way to widen its product shelf without building everything itself. The companies specifically flagged the distribution of selected Standard Bank products and services through OPay's consumer and merchant platform as an area to explore.

That could have meant savings and investment products, additional lending for consumers and businesses, and insurance — all plugged into an ecosystem of more than 50 million monthly users. Standard Bank, for its part, would have gained a digital distribution channel to reach customers underserved by conventional banking, rather than relying solely on its own branches and channels.

Remittances were on the table too. Nigeria received $20.93 billion in personal remittances in 2024, according to the Central Bank of Nigeria. OPay already runs a domestic wallet network through which recipients can receive and spend money. Connecting that network to Standard Bank's international banking relationships could have enabled last-mile digital delivery of remittances — recipients getting funds in a wallet instead of withdrawing cash — and opened cross-border payment corridors without OPay building banking relationships in every market independently.

"If implemented, we believe the collaboration could broaden the range of financial products available through [the] OPay platform, deepen consumer and merchant engagement and create additional monetisation opportunities across our ecosystem," OPay said.

What happens now

One crucial caveat: the arrangement was non-binding and never obliged either company to implement a specific initiative. As part of the October 9 deal, Standard Bank's Africa head, Lungisa Fuzile, was also set to join OPay's board of directors.

For OPay, the stakes are straightforward. The company was trying to accelerate its transition from a Nigerian payments giant into a broader financial services platform across emerging markets, and Standard Bank could have supplied much of the infrastructure to make that expansion possible. With the IPO withdrawn and the investment's conditions unmet, that roadmap is now uncertain — and OPay's diversification problem, with nearly nine-tenths of revenue tied to one country, remains unsolved.