OPay's path to the New York Stock Exchange was never going to be straightforward. On October 30, the Nigerian fintech withdrew its $304 million New York listing after a regulatory inquiry from Chinese authorities, the home country of founder Zhou Yahui. Executives had just rung the opening bell at the NYSE days earlier, a moment meant to mark a triumphant arrival on the global stage. Instead, it became the latest obstacle in a company that has never had a shortage of them.
The story starts in 2018, when Opera, the browser company led by Zhou, acquired a controlling stake in Paycom, a small mobile money operator in Nigeria. A Central Bank of Nigeria capital rule that year had set a minimum capital requirement of two billion naira for mobile money operators, making undercapitalized institutions like Paycom affordable to acquire. OPay launched that July, building on an agent banking model designed to reach unbanked Nigerians. That agent network is still one of its core competitive advantages today.
Also in December 2018, OPay sold its lending product OKash to Opera for $9.5 million, a move that would matter more than it seemed at the time. Lending eventually grew into OPay's largest revenue driver, and the company turned profitable in 2025 on the back of rapid growth in that business.
What helped OPay stand out was a decision to abandon its super app ambitions and go deep on payments instead. That focus paid off during Nigeria's 2023 cash crisis, when commercial bank apps buckled under pressure and OPay emerged as one of the trusted alternatives. Fifty million users later, the company is a different animal from the scrappy mobile money operator it once was.
Every major phase of OPay's growth has been shaped by forces outside its control, from CBN policy shifts to currency crises to now a cross-border regulatory inquiry. The question is whether the same mix of patience, capital, and willingness to start over that got it this far will be enough to get it listed.
Originally published by TechCabal.