OPay's NYSE IPO Filing Draws Scrutiny Over Employee Stock Options and Lending Unit Economics
OPay's NYSE IPO filing is drawing scrutiny on two fronts: the omission of employee stock option disclosures, flagged as a governance concern ahead of a landmark African fintech listing, and newly disclosed lending unit economics showing approximately $2.55 in revenue per $10 lent. The figures provide rare hard data on the risk pricing of Nigeria's buy-now-pay-later segment. The filing comes as OPay's transaction volumes have already been benchmarked against Nigeria's five largest commercial banks in earlier reporting.
OPay's Lending Books: half your revenue gone before you've paid a single bill
For every $10 OPay lends in Nigeria, it sets aside $1.28 just to cover loans it expects never to get back. That leaves $1.27 before paying for staff, technology, or the cost of borrowing the money in the first place.
Lending is already OPay's biggest business — bigger than payments. But provisions are growing faster than revenue: up 210% against revenue growth of 168% in the first half of 2026. The gap is widening, not closing.
OPay is betting that shifting toward merchant loans will bring the default rate down. That may be right. But right now, public market investors are being asked to price a lending book where the economics are still unresolved — and where the charge-off timeline is aggressive enough that the headline 4.3% bad-loan ratio isn't directly comparable to the 8% the banking industry reports.
The payments story is clean. The lending story is the one that actually needs scrutiny.
2 sources
- Nine Years After Its Founding, OPay’s IPO Filing Leaves Questions Over Employee Stock Options · launchbaseafrica.com · T1
- OPay’s $1.28 lending problem in Nigeria · techcabal.com · T1