OPay Pulls $304 Million NYSE IPO Hours Before Shares Were Set to Trade

OPay had already priced its shares and picked a ticker. Then a regulatory inquiry in an unnamed foreign jurisdiction derailed the offering before the shares could begin trading.

OPay announced the pricing of its New York IPO at $19 a share on October 30, with the sale of 16 million shares expected to raise $304 million and trading due to begin that day under the ticker OPAY. It never happened. According to Bloomberg, the SoftBank-backed fintech and its underwriters mutually agreed to terminate the underwriting agreement so OPay could respond to what it called a regulatory inquiry. The company has not said which country’s regulator is asking questions, what agency is involved, or what exactly it wants to know.

That silence is doing a lot of work. OPay says the matter is immaterial to its core business, expects it to resolve quickly, and insists its operations in Nigeria, its largest market, along with Indonesia, Egypt and Pakistan, are running normally. It’s a hard claim to verify when the company won’t name the regulator asking the questions. Reuters and other outlets covering the withdrawal noted OPay gave no further detail beyond that reassurance.

The timing is brutal for a listing that had cleared nearly every hurdle. OPay had set terms for 16 million American depositary shares at $19 to $21 each, implying a market value of roughly $4.2 billion at the midpoint, and the deal had already been priced at the low end. Trading was due to begin later that day. Pulling an IPO after pricing, rather than before it, is rare enough that it signals the inquiry landed late and landed hard.

OPay traces back to 2017, when it established a Hong Kong entity and launched its first payment platform in collaboration with Opera, the browser company. It launched digital payment services in Nigeria in 2018 after acquiring a local financial services provider. Zhou, who also built the Chinese gaming and investment group Kunlun Tech, held roughly 21.3% of OPay going into the IPO, according to the company’s own filings, with Opera holding about 8.6% and SoftBank entities around 6.6%. SoftBank’s Vision Fund led a $400 million round in 2021 that valued OPay at $2 billion, its first African bet and, at the time, one of the largest fintech financings the continent had seen.

Five years later, the numbers had grown enough to justify a listing roughly double that valuation. OPay’s revenue rose 137% to $467 million in the first half of 2026, and net income more than quadrupled to $91 million, with lending overtaking payments as its biggest revenue source. The company counted more than 50 million monthly active users as of July. Those are the kind of figures that usually get a fintech to the finish line, not pulled back from the finish line hours before the gun.

What makes the withdrawal sting more is who was watching. OPay would have been one of the largest African fintech listings on a major US exchange, a genuine test of whether Wall Street still has appetite for emerging-market payments companies after a run of disappointing fintech debuts elsewhere. Nscale, the AI infrastructure company also chasing a US listing this year, has already had to cut its own valuation target from around $30 billion toward the $16 billion to $19 billion range investors are actually willing to pay, according to people familiar with the talks. OpenAI, for its part, pushed its prospective IPO into 2027 while pursuing a private funding round at a valuation that had reportedly fallen to about $1.25 trillion. Against that backdrop, a priced, ticker-assigned IPO getting yanked by an unnamed regulator reads less like a one-off hiccup and more like confirmation that this is not a friendly IPO window for anything outside the safest, most familiar names.

Frankly, the vague wording should give investors pause, not comfort. A company that can say “the inquiry does not involve our Nigerian licenses” or “this concerns a sanctions screening question” would say so. OPay said neither. It said the matter is unrelated to day-to-day operations and left it there, which is the kind of statement that resolves nothing and invites every reader to fill in the blank themselves.

SoftBank, for its part, has been down this road before. The firm’s fintech and consumer-tech bets have a mixed record of surviving public scrutiny once the paperwork actually gets filed, and a halted IPO after pricing is a worse outcome for its stake than a delayed one would have been. Whether OPay revives the listing in weeks or lets it quietly die depends entirely on what the regulator it won’t name turns out to be asking about.

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