OPay's IPO Filing Reveals Nigeria's Favourite Payments App Is Now Mostly a Lender

For years, OPay’s pitch to Nigerians was simple: move money faster than your bank. Its green logo is on kiosk walls and phone screens across the country. Now that the company wants to list in New York, its prospectus tells a slightly different story. The payments app has quietly become a lender, and lending is where both the money and the headaches are.

What the filing shows

OPay’s registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, filed on October 9, shows revenue of $467.06 million in the first half of 2026, up 136.5% from a year earlier, according to Nairametrics. Profit after tax rose to $90.87 million from $21.71 million.

The biggest driver was credit. Income from loans rose 167.9% to $236.12 million, or 50.6% of total revenue. Payment services brought in $130.55 million, about 28%. New loans issued in Nigeria more than tripled to $927.63 million, and the number of quarterly unique borrowers almost doubled from 3.5 million to 6.7 million.

The other side of the ledger

Lending more money to more people has a familiar catch: not all of it comes back. OPay set aside $118.36 million for expected credit losses in the half, up 210.3%. It also wrote off $113.15 million of loans it considered uncollectible, a 520.5% jump, and more than the $69.95 million it wrote off in the whole of 2025. A further $113.80 million in loans and interest was overdue as of June 30.

TechCabal put it in simpler terms: for every $10 OPay lent, it set aside roughly $1.28 for losses.

The company argues the picture is improving. Its non-performing loan ratio fell to 4.3% from 4.8% a year earlier, WeeTracker reports, and the filing says OPay has “tightened risk appetite in consumer loans,” shifting towards merchant lending, where it can watch a business’s daily cash flow through its own point-of-sale terminals. It disbursed $99 million in merchant loans in the first half.

Why investors will care

OPay plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange, with a secondary listing in Nigeria, and Standard Bank has agreed to invest up to $200 million alongside the offering, according to WeeTracker. That is a vote of confidence in the lending model.

It is also a reminder of what investors are actually buying. A payments network earns small fees on huge volumes and rarely loses the principal. A lender earns fat margins until the credit cycle turns, and Nigerian borrowers have faced high interest rates and rising living costs. OPay’s bet is that the data from its payments network makes it a better judge of who will repay than a traditional bank.

The first-half numbers say that bet is profitable. The write-off line says it is not free. Online, Nigerian users have responded the way users always do when a fintech publishes its loan losses: with memes daring the company to send money to their accounts, too.

The Daily Snark does not give investment advice. This article is commentary on public filings and reporting.