When Optasia exploded onto the JSE last November, there was great investor excitement around it; finally, not only was there a new listing on the exchange, but an impressive one – the largest fintech listing the JSE had seen since 2018. The IPO raised R6.5bn – well over the R1.3bn in new capital Optasia was seeking – and was several times oversubscribed. FirstRand even swooped in early to purchase a 20.1% stake ahead of the listing (which it has recently bumped up to 26.1%).
So far, the listing has already delivered a host of tangible benefits, the company tells Currency. Not only has it granted the company “immediate additional credibility in markets,” but it has also strengthened its partnerships with local banks and companies and provided the capital it needs to deploy in its Asian expansion.
Everyone from reporters to analysts seemed to be hugely positive about Optasia at the time of its listing; FNB even described it as “divinely visionary”. Now, six months down the line, the dust is settling.
“The initial hype around it has faded, and the market is assessing it for the long-term now,” says Zwelakhe Mnguni, chief investment officer at Benguela Global Fund Managers.
And the market seems to be split on its view of the business. Some were never convinced in the first place; for Aeon Investment Management CEO Asief Mohamed, Optasia’s valuation was specifically an issue that kept the firm from the IPO. Indeed, the company has a price-to-earnings ratio of 21 – “that’s quite expensive in our books”, he says.
Mnguni agrees it is pricey on a valuation basis. And from a stock perspective, it hasn’t quite excelled. “It’s definitely underperformed the broader SA basket of stocks,” says Anchor Capital analyst Keagan Higgins. “But from an operations perspective, it’s exceeded expectations and raised guidance in the near term.”
Why it actually works
“The one word I’d use to describe Optasia is unique,” says Higgins. The price and speed at which it provides its third-party style services make it invaluable to both ends of its supply chain, and the markets it has chosen to enter are ideal for the airtime credit and microloans it is providing.
“When you look at what it takes to score someone on a credit basis, it takes a significant amount of money,” explains Higgins. “And if you’re trying to provide loans at the lower end of the market, the cost to score the loan makes it non-profitable.” Optasia’s cost to score loans is significantly lower than most banks’, allowing it to process more than 1.5 billion credit decisions per month.
In explaining its decision to focus on emerging markets, Optasia states that the market opportunity is “substantial and durable”. The company notes that “global mobile money transactions reached $2-trillion in 2025, and Sub-Saharan Africa alone accounts for approximately 67% of global mobile money transaction value”.
“I do think they have something special,” Mnguni says. “Their greatest advantage is not necessarily the platform they have, but the relationships they have with the banks and the (telecommunications companies).”
And no one can deny the power of the AI hysteria surrounding it right now. The market is taken by anything AI-related at the moment, and Higgins agrees that Optasia is “riding the coattails” of this hype.
Its AI-based, data-driven platform is its major selling point, as Higgins points to the fact that “the more consumers and customers they get on board, the better their data is, which means they can score more effectively and efficiently. It’s a nice flywheel to have”.
Optasia is also a business that knows how to morph, another positive that the analysts agree on. In 2019, its airtime credit services (ACS) accounted for 99% of revenue, while microfinancing (MFS) accounted for just 1%. By 2025, MFS had ballooned to 62% of revenue, with ACS accounting for 37%.
Its geographic spread has also substantially changed. In 2019, close to 50% of Optasia’s revenue was from Nigeria and 16% from South Africa. Nigeria now accounts for 13.5% of revenue and South Africa 11%.
The Nigerian reality check
Optasia cut down on its Nigerian business just in time as well, as its operations there have recently been burned by regulatory issues. Its ACS, provided in partnership with MTN, was suspended amid the implementation of new digital lending rules. ACS in Nigeria accounted for approximately 14% of Optasia’s revenue in 2025. That works out to about R608m on the line for the company, though it has said it does not expect any serious material impacts to come from this suspension.
Investors who read through the IPO documents would have noted that Nigeria already posed a regulatory risk. Still, seeing that risk come to fruition so soon after listing has inevitably unsettled some shareholders.
It is definitely a wake-up call for the company, one that Mnguni hopes will shock the business into shape. MTN has previously had “a lethargic reaction to regulation”, he explains, and was suspended and fined. Hopefully, Optasia can avoid making similar regulatory mistakes. “Once they get that model resolved there, they can replicate that same discipline to avoid regulatory risk everywhere else.”
Mohamed is less sanguine. “The Nigerian suspension of Optasia can easily spill over into other markets they operate in,” he says, which represents a serious risk to its business structure. Regulation of credit lending has become famously strict in Nigeria, and if other African countries follow suit, Optasia and its operators will have to pay close attention quickly.
More questions than answers
This crack might be small, but it highlights the fact that Optasia is not as perfect as the banks (and certainly FirstRand) might make it seem. The business is still relatively new to many South African investors, who might feel angst about the lack of clarity around the business model.
For Mohamed, the description of Optasia as a fintech is even ambiguous. “I know that this thing was specifically wrapped and marketed as a fintech to get [a] higher rating” from the market, he says. But “it’s really a lending business with technology around it”.
Optasia makes a big deal of its AI data platform, but analysts agree it comes with several problems. “You can have AI, but can you run the AI over data that you don’t have?” asks Mohamed. He doubts that Optasia has the sizeable database to run a credit scoring platform of real magnitude, unlike a business like Capitec, which has been building its database for decades.
In the long run, Optasia’s competitive advantage will diminish, says Mnguni: “At some point, somebody will be able to replicate your platform. I do not think that there is a challenger that is ready to challenge them in the next 3-5 years, but beyond that, I would start getting worried.”
Running a platform off an algorithm created and monitored by publicly accessible AI systems means Optasia has no real differentiator. “If they don’t have some sort of structural advantage, what are the growth prospects?” wonders Mohamed.
Mnguni questions what would stop telecommunications companies from building Optasia’s same algorithms internally and running their own credit scoring system.
Something Higgins thinks investors would also like to see less of from Optasia is related party transactions – “South Africans have a pretty tenuous history” with them, he notes. “That’s the sort of thing that keeps people on the sidelines.”
Most recently, Optasia founder Bassim Haidar’s 80.5% stake in Finergi was purchased for R500m in cash, raising eyebrows.
Following this, Haidar’s R1.48bn sell-down of his stake in Optasia to FirstRand left him with just a 1.5% stake in the company. Founders selling down is not necessarily unusual, but the size and speed at which Haidar sold off his share prompts an uncomfortable question: why would the individual with the most insight into the business step aside just as the company is meant to be taking off?
The fact that the stake was sold off to an investor as sturdy as FirstRand might reassure some. But six months in, the question is no longer whether Optasia could list. It is whether its competitive moat survives contact with regulators, telcos and time.
Top image: Rawpixel/Currency collage.
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