Two of Africa’s biggest mobile money businesses are going public. They are not just fintech success stories, both grew on the infrastructure the telcos already owned, the SIM, the agent on the corner, so their success is, in part, a telco success.

Airtel Money listed on the London Stock Exchange on October 14th at about $7 billion. OPay is heading to the New York Stock Exchange soon, at about $4 billion.

In both cases, the twist is that the telcos are not the one realizing these valuations nor the ones banking the money.
So the real question is this: why are the telcos, who connected Nigeria, not winning the wallet on top of it?

Airtel Money is worth $7bn without its Nigerian operations.
Airtel Money is the money arm of Airtel Africa, a mobile network operator across 14 countries in Africa. Airtel Africa is listed in London and Lagos stock exchanges, valued at $13 billion. Its largest market is Nigeria, where Airtel is the second-largest telco, with more than 60 million subscribers. The mobile money business is run as a separate company.

Across 13 markets, Airtel Money is the wallet on the phone, and it is the part Airtel is listing in London at $7 billion.
In Nigeria, Smartcash is Airtel’s mobile money arm but it is not included in the listing because in the other markets the wallet grew on the telco’s network and the regulators let it lend, through partners, from the start. In Nigeria, the wallet is on a tighter licence, a payment service bank, that requires it to sit inside the telco, not the money group. In 2024 the Central Bank of Nigeria made Airtel to move its 25 per cent stake in SmartCash out of the money arm and back into Airtel Nigeria, for $3 million. A back-of-the-napkin math would value the whole Smartcash wallet at about $12 million in the same week the rest of the group was priced at $7 billion.

In Airtel’s own prospectus, Nigeria is 1.24 per cent of Airtel mobile money’s revenue and 6.02 per cent of its customers. Last quarter, Airtel Money earned $297 million in East Africa, about three-quarters of its revenue. In Nigeria it earned $5 million. A sixty-fold gap, same company, a few markets apart.
So why does Smartcash, a Telco-led wallet with nearly 3 million customers, operating as a payment service bank, get valued at $12 million?
The gap is one product: lending.

Lending changes what a wallet is. In East Africa, Airtel Money is a bank in a phone. It lends, and it moves your money into a bank account, all behind one number. In Nigeria the wallet is a purse. It moves your money, and it pays you a little to keep it. In Kenya, 32 per cent of adults now borrow through a mobile wallet. In Nigeria, a payment service bank is not allowed to. Look at what each customer is worth and the gap shows itself. East Africa earns about $7 per user every quarter; Nigeria earns about a dollar and a half.

A wallet that lends is worth many times a wallet that only moves money. That is why the $7 billion belongs to East Africa, and why the Nigerian wallet, which cannot lend, was marked at $12 million.

OPay, the $4billion “bank on the phone”.
The telcos gave us the mobile numbers, OPay banked us with the mobile number as “default” bank account.
The Chinese-backed fintech operates almost exclusively in Nigeria and would be filing on the NYSE at $4 billion. It is raising money on a story the telcos cannot tell: a wallet that lends.

Ahead of the listing, Standard Bank, the South African bank, has agreed to take a stake of up to $200 million in the business.
OPay holds a mobile money operator licence from the central bank, the only category allowed to hold customer deposits, and its microfinance bank license allows it to lend. In January of this year, the central bank upgraded OPay to a national licence, all thirty-six states. That is the structure the telco wallet does not have. A payment service bank moves and holds money, but it cannot lend. OPay can, because it holds the licence that allows it.

Now “OPay” is part of the vocabulary of the average Nigerian. The easiest way to ask for someone’s number is to gesture that you want to send money to their OPay, which is their phone number minus the first zero. It has more than 50 million users, and its revenue more than doubled in the first half of the year to $467 million.

OPay is lending-led

Its loans brought in more than its payments did, roughly $236 million from lending in a half year, and it claims more than half of all the digital loans in the country. That is the exact product the Nigerian telco wallet is not allowed to sell.
The wallets that can lend are the ones growing.

That is why adoption of telco-led mobile money stunted. Imagine a market with 200 million SIMs controlled by 2 mobile operators, MTN and Airtel, holding 167.62 million subscribers, yet, both have not activated 10 million wallets between them.

The policy gap that keeps the telcos out
The Nigerian telcos live inside a policy gap. They connected two hundred million people, and 2 of the players own 86% of the SIM, the pipe that every call and data request travels down. But a customer holding an Airtel or an MTN SIM can keep every naira in a wallet the operator does not control.

The scarce asset is the money layer. Mobile connection has become a commodity. The value moved up the stack and onto the phone. The richest layer of the phone is the money. In the first quarter of last year, Nigerians moved more than twenty trillion naira through mobile money, according to the interbank settlement system. The telcos built the road. The money is what runs on it now, and the layer they are losing is the size of Nigeria’s MSME credit gap, about $236 billion.

I have worked in payments for ten years, and the pattern is the same every time: the rails get laid first, the value moves up, and the builder who cannot name which layer of the stack commands the valuation ends up pricing the pipe.

Telcos like Airtel have built the most valuable connectivity network in Africa and ran it for twenty years, and the market priced that network at $13 billion on the public market. The same market is pricing the money arm on top of it at $7 billion, more than half the whole group. If you are a builder, you have to know which layer of your business owns the money, and price it to capture separate value for it. Airtel Africa just did it. MTN is making a similar move.