Sometime before October 16, Onafriq was quietly trying to find a buyer for Baxi, its Nigerian agent banking business, before it ever made the shutdown public. The company had entered into a non-binding memorandum of terms with a prospective purchaser, covering 100% of the agency business and its related operations. As of July 29, when Onafriq's UK-filed financial statements were approved, those negotiations were still ongoing, with no confirmed structure, timeline, or financial terms in sight.
The numbers behind that decision are striking. Agency services revenue collapsed 56% in 2024, falling from $30.4 million the previous year to just $13.4 million. Onafriq also wrote off $4.56 million in goodwill tied to its Nigerian payments business, a clear signal that the company no longer expected to recover meaningful value from the investment it had made when it first acquired Baxi.
When Onafriq did announce the closure, it pointed to inflation, naira depreciation, rising operating costs, and the rapid growth of account-to-account transfers as the forces that made running an offline agent network financially unsustainable. What the statement left out was any mention of the prospective buyer or where negotiations stood.
The attempted sale closes a loop on a five-year strategy. Onafriq acquired Baxi specifically to plug a sprawling, cash-based Nigerian network into its pan-African payments infrastructure. By October, it was telling more than 460,000 agents to move their funds elsewhere, and the buyer it had been courting was still unnamed.
Originally published by TechCabal.