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# FirstRand now owns a quarter of the lender that decides who can borrow airtime, and its revenue just jumped 58%
- URL: https://www.businessbagel.com/optasia-micro-financing-solutions-group-revenue/
- Published: 2026-09-15T02:45:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-15T02:44:59.000Z
- Description: Optasia's micro-lending arm grew 84% in six months and now brings in almost three quarters of the group, which has raised what it expects for the full year.
- Author: Christian Maidman
- Tags: Companies, Business Bagel News

Optasia does not lend you the money. It decides, in the second between you asking and the network answering, whether you are good for it. The company sits behind mobile operators, banks and digital wallets across Africa and Asia, scoring people who have no credit record to score, and its platform handles more than 30 million transactions a day. On Monday morning it told the market what that is now worth.

Revenue for the six months to June rose 58%, to $185.3 million. Headline earnings per share, the cleaned-up profit figure JSE-listed companies have to report, rose half again to 2.79 US cents. Profit grew too, just not as fast as the top line: Optasia now keeps 42 cents of every dollar of revenue as operating cash earnings, and a year ago it kept more.

## The half that did the lifting

Micro-lending is the engine. Its revenue grew 84% and it now brings in just under three quarters of everything Optasia takes in, up from a little under two thirds a year ago. Ghana, Pakistan, Indonesia and Congo-Brazzaville did most of that, and the group says growth in markets it has been in for a while is coming from lending to more people, lending to them more often, and lending them larger amounts.

New ground helped too. Three deployments went live in the half, including the group's first in South Sudan and a new one in Gabon, and twelve more are in the delivery phase with more than eight meant to launch before the end of the year. Cash conversion, the share of earnings that actually turns into cash, improved to 41.9% from 24.3%. Bad debts barely moved, at 1.3% of what was lent.

## The FirstRand end of it

FirstRand has been buying in, and lifted its holding to 26.1% during the half. That is not passive. Optasia's decisioning now sits behind FNB Connect's airtime advance, and the two are building a cash advance inside the FNB wallet. The group also closed its purchase of Finergi, which lends through prepaid electricity meters, taking Optasia into utility credit for the first time. BusinessDay reports the price at nearly R500 million.

Nigeria is the part still healing. All operator partners were live again by 24 June after what BusinessDay describes as a two-month suspension, and the service now runs under a structure where several providers share the work and customers are allocated on performance.

Optasia has raised its full-year target to growth of 30 to 40% across revenue, operating cash earnings and normalised net income. That target assumes Nigeria stays exactly where it is now. Anything better, the company says, is upside.