Shola Akande If Bloomberg’s reporting proves correct, OPay could ring a bell in New York before the end of the year. The payments company, built on Nigerian consumers, Nigerian agents and Nigerian transactions, has reportedly engaged Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan for a potential United States listing targeting a valuation of around $4 billion. That would be good news. It would be a powerful validation of what many of us have argued for years: Nigeria can produce businesses capable of competing for global capital at the highest level. Nobody should begrudge OPay the deep capital pools, analyst coverage and international visibility that a New York listing can provide. Those advantages are real. But they should prompt a second question, rather than close the conversation. Why not both? A dual listing, New York for global capital and Lagos for the home market, is not a sentimental proposition. It is a commercial one. And the case rests on four things: customers, domestic liquidity, precedent and alignment. The first is the customer. OPay’s reported tens of millions of users are overwhelmingly Nigerian. They are the traders, artisans, students, small businesses and salary earners whose transactions helped build the franchise. A secondary listing on the Nigerian Exchange would give some of those customers the opportunity to become shareholders, converting economic participation into ownership. Nigeria has already seen what happens when a major consumer-facing company deliberately broadens domestic ownership. MTN Nigeria’s public offer attracted more than 126,000 retail investors and created tens of thousands of new market accounts. The lesson is not that every shareholder becomes a brand ambassador. It is that a strong Nigerian consumer franchise can generate substantial domestic investor interest. The second is liquidity. Nigeria’s capital market is not the market it was a few years ago. The banking recapitalisation has demonstrated the depth of domestic institutional capital, while pension assets have continued to expand. The Exchange now has dedicated indices designed to support institutional investment, including the NGX Pension and NGX Pension Broad indices. That matters because the argument for Lagos is no longer simply that Nigerians would like to own OPay. There is a potentially meaningful pool of domestic capital that could actually buy it. Nigeria’s market infrastructure has also moved forward. The shift to T+1 settlement brought the equities settlement cycle in line with foreign markets including New York, reducing one important source of operational friction for international investors. A Lagos listing would also give OPay access to naira-denominated demand and, depending on its eventual size and index eligibility, potentially broaden institutional demand through relevant domestic benchmarks. That is not a substitute for New York’s deeper pools of global capital. It is an additional source of liquidity and ownership. The third is precedent. This road has been walked before. Seplat has maintained a Lagos and London dual listing since 2014. Airtel Africa listed in London and subsequently in Lagos in 2019. Both demonstrated that a company can use an international market for global capital and visibility while retaining a meaningful connection to its home market. The point is not that OPay should copy either company. It is that the supposed choice between international capital and domestic ownership is not a choice at all. The two can coexist. The fourth is alignment. OPay operates within Nigeria’s regulated payments ecosystem. The Central Bank of Nigeria lists OPay Digital Services as a licensed mobile money operator, while the Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation lists it among insured mobile money operators. Its regulatory relationships, agent network and core customer base are deeply Nigerian. That creates a natural commercial argument for maintaining a visible presence in the country’s capital market. But there is an important concession to make. New York may well be the right primary market for OPay. A company seeking a multibillion-dollar valuation may reasonably conclude that New York offers the deepest pool of fintech investors, the strongest international analyst coverage, the broadest universe of comparable companies and the most efficient access to global capital. If that is the conclusion, it should not be treated as a failure of the Nigerian market. It should simply make the case for Lagos more precise. Lagos does not need to beat New York. It needs to complement it. A secondary Nigerian listing would allow OPay to establish a domestic ownership base without sacrificing the advantages of its international listing. New York
Don't miss out on breaking stories and in-depth articles.
