OPay bet agent payments replace Nigeria's cash; SoftBank's first Africa deal

A Nigerian mobile payments and agent-banking platform founded by Opera, offering transfers, bill payments, airtime and merchant services.

Browser distribution and Chinese capital could build Nigeria's cash-replacement agent payments platform, then replicate that model across Africa and the Middle East.

$50M (2019) plus $120M Series B from Chinese investors

Opera, the Norwegian browser company acquired by Chinese investors in 2016, founded OPay in 2018 in Lagos to turn its African user base into a fintech business. It launched a payments wallet alongside motorcycle ride-hailing ORide and food delivery OFood, raising $50M in June 2019 and a $120M Series B in November 2019 from Meituan-Dianping, Sequoia China, Source Code Capital and others, reaching 140,000 agents and $10M in daily transaction volume.

In 2020, a Lagos government ban on motorcycle ride-hailing plus the pandemic forced OPay to close ORide and its bike-sharing business, leaving payments as the core bet. In August 2021 SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led a $400M Series C valuing OPay at $2B, its first investment in Africa; the company said monthly transaction volumes exceeded $3B and it would replicate the model in Egypt and the Middle East.

OPay kept scaling in Nigeria and Egypt; by 2025 Opera's 9.5% stake implied a valuation around $3.1B. In 2026 it prepared a US IPO targeting about $4B with Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan engaged, and Africa's Standard Bank was in early talks to take a pre-IPO stake.

Opera's browser gave OPay unmatched distribution and data on African users, lowering customer acquisition costs versus standalone fintechs.

The agent network matched how cash-based Nigerians actually transact, making the platform a bridge rather than a leap.

Chinese investors brought playbooks from Meituan and Alipay-style ecosystems, funding the multi-service experiment cheaply.

When ride-hailing died, the company had already built the payments layer that SoftBank was willing to value at $2B.

When a platform bets on multiple high-frequency services, the payments rail is the durable asset: the ride-hailing and delivery side can die while the wallet underneath keeps compounding value.

As of August 2026, OPay was scaling toward a public listing: reports said it had engaged Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan for a US IPO that could value it around $4 billion, up from $2 billion in 2021, and Standard Bank Group was in early talks to acquire a stake. Opera still held roughly 9.5% of the company, which had implied a valuation of about $3.1 billion in 2025. OPay continued to operate in Nigeria and Egypt, focused on mobile payments, transfers and merchant services.