OPay has built a financial services platform that moves money, extends credit, and helps millions of people save. It operates in Nigeria, Indonesia, Egypt, and Pakistan, but its business remains heavily concentrated in Nigeria, which accounts for 89.5% of its revenue.
That concentration presents a problem for a fintech seeking to become a pan-African financial services business. Expanding into new markets allows OPay to diversify its revenue, reach underserved consumers, and replicate its financial services model beyond Nigeria. But entering a new market requires more than deploying an app. It requires banking infrastructure, regulatory relationships, local partnerships, and access to payment networks.
Standard Bank, Africa’s largest bank by assets, offered a potential shortcut.
On October 9, Standard Bank Group agreed to invest approximately $185 million in OPay, with the bank’s Africa head, Lungisa Fuzile, also set to join OPay’s board of directors. The investment was conditional on the successful completion of the fintech’s planned IPO and the receipt of applicable regulatory approvals.
Beyond the investment, the parties intended to explore opportunities in African markets involving digital banking and the distribution of selected Standard Bank products and services through OPay’s consumer and merchant platform.
But on October 30, OPay withdrew its planned New York Stock Exchange listing following a reported regulatory inquiry from China.
The failed IPO has raised questions about what OPay could lose from a partnership that promised access to some of the infrastructure, relationships, and financial products it needed to expand across Africa.
The infrastructure OPay needed
When OPay enters a market, it typically identifies a specific pain point it can solve. In Nigeria, payments were fast and accessible.
“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,” the fintech said in its prospectus.
The company has also used acquisitions to establish a presence in new markets. In Nigeria, a consortium led by OPay’s founder, Zhou Yahui, acquired a controlling stake in Paycom, a mobile-money operator, in 2018. In Pakistan, OPay acquired Finja, an electronic-money institution, in 2023.
But replicating that model across Africa requires more than acquiring a local fintech or deploying the same technology. Every market has different licensing requirements, banking systems, payment networks, and regulatory relationships.
To solve this, the fintech prioritises markets where it can obtain an appropriate banking license or operate through appropriately licensed partners.
Standard Bank operates across 21 African markets and has established relationships with regulators, financial institutions, businesses, and other participants in those financial systems. Its local knowledge and banking infrastructure help OPay navigate market-entry requirements, identify potential partners, and establish operations faster than it could independently.
“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.
OPay is particularly interested in markets where digital payments remain underpenetrated, and there is room to build new consumer and merchant relationships. “We intend to expand into new markets where we see clear unmet need and a path to build the full OPay model,” the company further noted in its prospectus.
Several markets within Standard Bank’s footprint fit that description. The bank operates in countries including Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Mozambique, and Zambia.
In 2024, only 19.2% of adults in Zambia and 18.5% in Mozambique made digital merchant payments, according to GSMA, the global industry body for mobile operators. In Ghana, the figure was 27.3%. These adoption gaps point to markets where a payments platform could build transaction habits and establish relationships with consumers and merchants.
Standard Bank’s existing relationships and knowledge of these markets could have helped OPay navigate the institutional complexity of expansion while reducing the time and resources required to establish a presence.
More financial products for OPay’s customers
The proposed collaboration also offered OPay an opportunity to expand the range of financial products available through its platform without having to develop every offering independently.
OPay already has a sizeable consumer and merchant ecosystem. It has over 50.1 million monthly active users. Its services include digital payments, savings, consumer lending, and merchant financial services. Standard Bank could have complemented these offerings with selected products from its existing portfolio.
The companies specifically identify the distribution of Standard Bank products and services through OPay’s consumer and merchant platform as an area they intend to explore.
This could have given OPay’s customers access to a wider range of financial services without the fintech having to develop every product independently.
Savings and investment products, for instance, could have expanded the ways customers put their money to work. Additional lending products could have supported consumers and businesses with different financing needs. Insurance and other financial services could have offered additional distribution opportunities.
Remittances were also on the table. Nigeria received $20.93 billion in personal remittances in 2024, according to the Central Bank of Nigeria. Standard Bank’s international banking relationships and African footprint could have helped OPay develop additional cross-border payment corridors.
OPay already had a domestic wallet network through which recipients could receive and spend money. Connecting that distribution network to Standard Bank’s banking relationships could have enabled it to participate more deeply in last-mile distribution of international remittances, allowing recipients to receive funds digitally without first withdrawing cash.
Standard Bank’s presence across multiple African markets could also have given OPay access to potential cross-border payment corridors without requiring it to establish banking relationships independently in every market. This would have offered another route to extend its business beyond domestic payments.
“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.
For Standard Bank, OPay’s platform offered a different kind of distribution advantage. Rather than relying solely on its own channels to reach customers, it could leverage OPay’s digital network to distribute selected products to consumers and merchants underserved by conventional banking services.
However, the proposed arrangement remained exploratory. The arrangement was non-binding and did not oblige either company to implement a specific initiative.
For OPay, the opportunity was to accelerate its transition from a Nigerian payments giant into a broader financial services platform across emerging markets. Standard Bank could have supplied some of the infrastructure to make that expansion possible. With the IPO withdrawn, that opportunity is now uncertain.