OPay made $72m profit in 2025 after losing $51m the year before

Everyone knows African consumer fintech burns cash. The narrative is well-worn: acquire users at any cost, subsidise transactions, dominate the wallet, and pray monetisation catches up before the runway ends. OPay, Nigeria's largest mobile money operator by transaction volume, was supposed to be the prime exhibit. In FY2024, the company lost $50.98 million. It was the familiar story — massive scale, massive losses. Then the audited FY2025 numbers arrived, and the story changed shape entirely.

According to an investment document seen by Nairametrics, OPay Limited swung to a net profit of $72.47 million in FY2025 from a $50.98 million loss in FY2024. That is a swing of over $123 million in a single financial year. Revenue surged 161% to $536.3 million from $205.73 million. Operating income moved from a $35.10 million loss to a $107.10 million profit. The company processed $358 billion in gross transaction value, more than double the $166.2 billion recorded in 2024. These are not incremental improvements. This is a step-change in what a Nigerian fintech at scale can produce.

The figures matter beyond OPay. They are contained in audited consolidated financial statements prepared for a planned initial public offering — reportedly targeting a listing on the New York Stock Exchange at a valuation around $4 billion, according to Business360. If that listing materialises, it would be one of the largest public debuts by an African-origin consumer fintech. The audited numbers are the pitch deck to Wall Street, and they finally answer the question that has hung over Nigerian fintech for a decade: can this model actually make money?

The prevailing assumption in African tech circles has been that payment wallets are a volume game with thin margins — useful for engagement, but not a standalone business. Banks, the argument went, would always hold the deposits and the lending margins. Fintechs like OPay would be forced to either become banks themselves or remain perpetually dependent on venture funding. The FY2024 loss seemed to confirm this. What the FY2025 numbers suggest is that the equation flips once transaction volume reaches a certain threshold and lending scales alongside it. OPay originated $938.3 million in loans in 2025, up 285% year-on-year, according to a breakdown of the same figures shared by Mohammed on X. That lending book is where the profit is being generated — not from the payments alone, but from what the payments data enables.

The scale is now difficult to dismiss. OPay's 39.3 million monthly active users in 2025 — up 57% from 25.1 million the prior year — represents a user base larger than the population of Ghana. Daily active users reached 22.7 million in Q4 2025, implying a DAU/MAU ratio of 57.8%, a level of engagement that most consumer apps globally would envy. Reuters reported in November 2025 that OPay had surpassed 20 million daily active users globally, making it one of the top 10 fintech apps by DAUs worldwide. The FY2025 audited figures now put hard financial numbers behind that growth story.

The profit engine is lending, not payments

OPay's revenue of $536.3 million on gross transaction volume of $358 billion implies a take rate of approximately 0.15%. That is razor-thin — consistent with a payments business where most of the value flows through the rails rather than accruing to the operator. Yet the company generated an EBITDA margin of 21.1% on that revenue, with non-GAAP EBITDA of $113.15 million, up from a $33.56 million loss in FY2024. How do you get a 21% margin on a 0.15% take rate? The answer lies in what sits on top of the payment flow.

Lending is the lever. The $938.3 million in loans originated in 2025 — up 285% from the previous year — represents the monetisation layer that converts transaction data into interest income. Every wallet transaction generates a data point: how often a user receives money, when they run low, how reliably they repay. OPay has spent years building that dataset across 39.3 million monthly active users. The 2025 numbers suggest the company has finally figured out how to underwrite against it at scale. The loans are small, short-tenor, and high-velocity — the kind of book that generates significant interest income relative to principal if default rates are managed. The 13.5% net profit margin cited in the investment document reflects this shift from pure payments to payments-plus-credit.

The bank comparison is closer than it looks

Nairametrics' comparison of OPay's $72.47 million net profit to Nigerian banks is instructive. The fintech's profit is equivalent to roughly 58% of FCMB Group's profit after tax and 43% of Fidelity Bank's profit after tax for comparable periods, according to the analysis. FCMB and Fidelity are both tier-2 Nigerian banks with decades of operating history, full banking licences, and balance sheets in the trillions of naira. A private fintech that didn't exist a decade ago is now within striking distance of their profitability — while growing revenue at 161%.

The comparison cuts both ways. On one hand, it validates the fintech thesis: digital distribution and data-driven lending can produce bank-like economics with a fraction of the physical infrastructure. OPay doesn't need 300 branches to reach 39 million users. On the other hand, the comparison highlights how far OPay still is from the tier-1 banks. Access Holdings, Zenith Bank, and UBA reported profits after tax well above $200 million in comparable periods. OPay may be approaching FCMB's earnings, but it remains a fraction of the industry leaders. The question for the IPO is whether investors will price OPay as a bank — with bank multiples — or as a high-growth technology company, where the 161% revenue growth justifies a far richer valuation than any Nigerian bank commands.

The IPO document is doing heavy lifting

It is worth being precise about what these numbers are and what they are not. OPay is still a private company. It is not listed on the Nigerian Exchange, and these figures are not from an NGX issuer disclosure. They come from an investment document prepared for a planned IPO, and are based on audited consolidated financial statements for the years ended December 31, 2024 and 2025, as reported by Nairametrics. Audited numbers from a Big Four firm carry real weight. But the framing around them — the narrative of a $4 billion valuation, the selection of which metrics to highlight, the EBITDA adjustments — is designed to tell a specific story to potential investors.

The non-GAAP EBITDA figure of $113.15 million is a case in point. EBITDA excludes interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation — all of which are real costs. For a lending-heavy business, the interest expense on any borrowed capital used to fund loans is a material line item. The gap between EBITDA ($113.15m) and net profit ($72.47m) is $40.68 million — that gap represents, among other things, the cost of capital and tax. Investors will want to see how that gap evolves as the lending book grows and whether OPay can fund its loan origination from deposits or must lean on more expensive wholesale funding.

What the data cannot tell us is whether this profitability is sustainable through a full credit cycle. The 285% growth in loan origination happened during a period of relatively stable Nigerian macroeconomic conditions in 2025. A downturn — or a spike in defaults among the small-ticket consumer and SME borrowers who make up OPay's lending book — could reverse the trajectory quickly. The loan book is young, and young loan books look good until they don't. Audited FY2025 financials tell us where the company is. They do not tell us how the portfolio will perform when Nigeria's economy faces its next stress test.

The broader context also matters. OPay operates in an environment of heightened Central Bank of Nigeria scrutiny on fintechs — KYC enforcement, crypto restrictions, and mobile money oversight have all intensified in recent years. The sustainability of 57.8% DAU/MAU engagement and 115% growth in GTV depends on continued regulatory tolerance for the agency banking and wallet models that drive OPay's distribution. None of this shows up in a profit-and-loss statement, but it shapes the risk profile that IPO investors will assess.

For founders, the lesson is not simply that OPay made money. It is that the path to profitability in African consumer fintech runs through lending. Payments volume creates the data; data enables underwriting; underwriting produces interest income; interest income drives margin. Companies that only process payments without building the credit layer will struggle to replicate OPay's margin profile. For operators, the DAU/MAU ratio of 57.8% is a benchmark worth studying — most consumer fintechs globally consider anything above 30% to be strong engagement. OPay is operating at nearly double that threshold, which explains why transaction volume can double in a single year without a proportional increase in acquisition spend.

For investors, the $4 billion target valuation implies roughly 55 times FY2025 net profit — a technology-company multiple, not a bank multiple. Nigerian banks trade at price-to-earnings ratios in the single digits. If OPay lists at $4 billion, the market will be making a bet that the 161% revenue growth continues and that the lending book scales without a corresponding deterioration in credit quality. For regulators, the bank comparison raises a question that will not go away: if a fintech with a mobile money licence is approaching tier-2 bank profitability, does the current licensing framework adequately capture the risks it poses to financial stability? The CBN will be watching the IPO process closely, and the answers to that question will shape future regulation.

There are significant unknowns here. We do not know the default rate on the $938.3 million loan book, or how much of the EBITDA improvement came from reduced customer incentives versus genuine operational leverage. We do not know the revenue split between payments, lending, and other services — the investment document has not been made public in full. We do not know how much of the growth is Nigeria-specific versus pan-African, despite OPay's positioning as an Africa-focused fintech. We do not know the timeline for the NYSE listing or whether current market conditions will support a $4 billion valuation for an African consumer fintech in 2026. The gap between audited profitability and successful IPO is measured in more than just financial performance.

What to watch: the formal IPO filing, which will make the full audited financials public and reveal the underwriting details; OPay's H1 2026 numbers, which will show whether the growth and margin trajectory is holding; any CBN response to a fintech of this scale listing in New York rather than Lagos; and the performance of Interswitch and Flutterwave, which are watching closely and may use OPay's outcome as a benchmark for their own listing plans. The OPay story is no longer about whether Nigerian fintech can scale — the 2025 numbers answer that question. It is now about whether global capital markets will pay for it.