Standard Bank has found a way to sit on almost every side of the table at one Nigerian company. OPay, a payments app, filed on Friday to list on the New York Stock Exchange, and its paperwork names Standard Bank as a buyer of the shares, one of the banks selling them, the source of a new director and a partner on future projects.
The buying part is the simplest. Alongside the listing, Stanbic Africa Holdings, part of Standard Bank Group, will buy new OPay shares directly, but only if the listing goes ahead and regulators approve. The price is capped three ways: US$200 million, a sliver of Standard Bank's regulatory capital, or whatever 4.99% of OPay costs at the listing price, and the smallest of the three wins. Bloomberg estimates it will come to about US$185 million. Whatever the final figure, the bank has agreed not to sell any of those shares for a year.
The bank on both sides of the listing
Selling the shares is the second job. The Standard Bank of South Africa is one of the four banks representing the underwriters, the firms that line up buyers for a new listing, alongside Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and China International Capital Corporation. The filing does not yet say how many shares are on offer, or at what price.
The third role is in the boardroom. Lungisa Fuzile, who runs Standard Bank's Africa Regions business and is a former director-general of the national Treasury, is nominated to join OPay's board as a non-executive director once the placement closes. In August the two companies also signed a memorandum of understanding to look for work they could do together, although the filing says it "does not obligate either party to implement any particular initiative". Group chief executive Sim Tshabalala said Standard Bank's "banking expertise and African footprint complement OPay's digital financial services platform".
A Nigerian business with a Singapore address
On paper, OPay is a Cayman Islands holding company with its head office in Singapore. In practice it is a Nigerian business: Nigeria brought in 89.5% of its revenue in the first half of 2026, up from about three-quarters in 2024. It is also growing fast. Revenue more than doubled between 2024 and 2025, to US$536.3 million, and profit for the first six months of this year was more than four times what it was a year earlier.
That concentration is what Standard Bank is buying into. Among its risks, the filing lists the chance that regulators in OPay's markets could temporarily stop it signing up new customers. Standard Bank already runs a Nigerian bank of its own, Stanbic IBTC, and its head of corporate and investment banking, Luvuyo Masinda, told Bloomberg it wants its West African earnings, now roughly half the size of its South African ones, to grow to about the same scale.
The listing still needs final approval from the New York Stock Exchange. When it comes, the shares, the board seat and the year-long lock-up all start on the same day.
