Opera’s Opay set to disrupt Nigeria’s fintech market
Opera, an International fintech company, a member of the Opera Group, is set to expand its Nigeria’s mobile payment service with Opera Pay. According to reports, to achieve the expansion, the company was at the concluding stages of talks to acquire a majority stake in Paycom, a mobile payment platform owned by Nigeria’s Telnet Group.
Opera’s acquisition of Paycom was speculated at the sum of $5 million and would help the company gain access to different aspects of payment processing across food, groceries, bills, bike-haling and mobile banking. It would also allow Opera Pay to acquire an operating license which is a requirement for operating a payment service business in Nigeria.
As predicted in Marketing Edge’s recent publication, Nigeria’s fintech landscape holds great potentials for rapid growth.
Market watchers describe the move as bullish in the fintech ecosystem suggesting that leaders such as Interswitch in that segment would rise to defend their business. They forecast a cutthroat competition in the coming months.
Nigeria has always been of key interest to Opera software in Africa as it announced in 2017 that it would invest $100 million on the African continent over the next two years. And Richard Monday, the Vice President of Opera Software Africa was reported to have said at the time that a large part of these funds, $40 million, would be invested in Nigeria.
Recall that Opera Pay recently launched ORide, its bike-hailing business that competes directly with Gokada, a market trailblazer in bike-hailing services. ORide will be one of the services offered within the Opera Pay app, according to reports. In response to ORide’s entry, Gokada recently announced that it has raised about $5.3 million from new and existing investors.
If Marketing Edge’s recent forecast is anything to go by, if a leading telco such as MTN, which was recently listed on NSE, implements its plan to obtain the PSB license and launches its mobile money service before the end of Q2 2019, which is about a month away, the FinTech space will not be the same again.
Opera Software AS is a Chinese-owned firm listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange.
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