Happy Sunday, Elly here.

Two very different IPO stories this week. OPay hired Wall Street's finest for a $4 billion US listing while Airtel delayed its $10 billion London debut, blaming Iran war costs. Both want to go public in 2026, but they're betting on completely different investor appetites. Meanwhile, Yoco handed CEO reins to a German banker with 25 years in European finance, Safaricom's data business overtook voice for the first time, and MiniPay hit 15 million wallets riding Africa's stablecoin wave.

In the Rapid Fire, we're tracking payment networks prepping for agentic commerce, Anthropic's AI joint venture with Blackstone and Goldman, and finally PayPal potentially splitting Venmo.

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Okay, onto today’s edition.

→ OPay hired Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan for a US IPO targeting $4 billion while Airtel delayed Airtel Money's London listing to H2 2026

→ Yoco appointed German banker Carsten Höltkemeyer as CEO, replacing co-founders in a founder-to-professional transition

→ Safaricom's mobile data revenue overtook voice for the first time, hitting KES 83.4 billion ($646 million) versus KES 81.8 billion for voice

→ MiniPay crossed 15 million activated wallets, more than doubling year-on-year as Africa embraces stablecoin payments

→ Moody's projects South Africa's government debt will stabilise in 2026 at 86.8% of GDP before declining to 84.9% by 2028

A little bit of valuation maths for you: if OPay's $4 billion valuation is based on 40 million users, and Airtel Money's $10 billion valuation is based on 54.1 million users, what's the difference in valuation per customer between the two companies?

(Answer at the end)

FINTECH

Two of Africa’s biggest digital finance players are preparing for potential IPOs in 2026, but they are taking very different routes to get there. Sino-Nigerian OPay, is best described as a combination of mobile money + POS wrapped in a Super App. Think of it as a combination of Ewallet + Vodapay + Yoco. Massive, right? They’ve hired Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan for a US IPO targeting $4 billion. Why do those names matter? Well, think of those banks as wedding planners throwing the wedding of the century - they have the best connections (i.e. hedgefund relationships) and will manage the event from start to finish.

And then there’s Airtel Africa. It delayed its Airtel Money London listing to H2 2026. Both companies want to go public in 2026, but they're approaching completely different investor bases. OPay was valued at $2 billion in 2021 and now serves 40 million Nigerian users through payments, transfers, savings, and 500,000 agents/middlemen. Airtel Money operates across 14 countries with 54.1 million customers and $215 billion in annualized transaction volume, contributing 21.1% of group revenue.

Airtel cited Iran war-driven market volatility and rising energy costs that will squeeze near-term margins. The London-listed telco posted fiscal 2026 results beating expectations with $3.16 billion core profit on $6.42 billion revenue. OPay's US listing strategy suggests confidence that American tech investors will pay premium multiples for African fintech, similar to how they valued Stripe and Block. Neither has filed publicly yet, but hiring bulge bracket banks signals both deals could close within months if macro conditions cooperate (US Fed Interest rates, Naira currency stability and Tech sentiment).

Here’s what’s actually fascinating about the entire story: on one hand, when OPay hires Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan and Airtel delays due to "market conditions," they're not even describing the same market. OPay is betting US investors will pay tech multiples for African payments volume (think Stripe, not a traditional bank like ABSA or Capitec). Meaning, they think US Investors will pay 10x -15x OPay’s current revenue.

Airtel is testing whether London investors will separate fintech performance from telecom parent company risk. This is why the timing split reveals two distinct paths: US route means pure-play fintech story with higher multiples but more volatility sensitivity; London route means telco carve-out narrative with lower multiples and less startup premium.

If both execute in 2026, the valuation gap sets the pricing framework for every African bank considering a digital spin-out and for fintechs who have been flirting with IPO's like Flutterwave. The question fintech executives need to answer is this: are you building a fintech that commands tech multiples, or are you a bank with a digital channel that gets banking multiples?

FINTECH

Yoco, South Africa’s payments startup darling, appointed Carsten Höltkemeyer as CEO effective June, replacing co-founders who ran the payments company since 2012. Höltkemeyer spent 25 years in European financial services, most recently as CEO of German banking software firm Solaris SE. All four founders remain: Katlego Maphai (strategy advisor), Lungisa Matshoba (chief product officer), Bradley Wattrus (CFO), and Carl Wazen (chief business officer). Yoco have reported their moving into a different category: rather than just payments alone they want to handle the SME business end-to-end. Essentially: end-to-end AI commerce platform for SME’s.

Yoco has raised ~$107 million to date, with $83 million in 2021 being South Africa's largest fintech round at the time. Founder-to-professional CEO transitions typically precede an exit or significant scale shifts. The move from Cape Town founders to a German banker with Barclays and RBS on his CV suggests preparation for cross-border expansion or liquidity events.

For South African fintechs eyeing international capital, this hire proves local success alone doesn't guarantee continued founder control at institutional scale. When founders voluntarily step aside for operators with multinational banking credentials, they're either building for acquisition or building for markets their current team can't access. Let’s watch and see.

TELECOMS

Safaricom's mobile data revenue surpassed voice for the first time in the year ending March 2026, marking a structural shift in how Kenya's largest telco makes money. Data accounted for 42.1% of connectivity revenue versus 41.3% for voice. Mobile data revenue rose 14.4% to KES 83.4 billion ($646 million), while voice grew just 1.3% to KES 81.8 billion. The transition reflects changing consumer habits across Kenya's 33.2 million smartphones. This represents a shift happening across the global telecom industry as consumers move away from traditional calls and SMS toward WhatsApp, streaming, social media, mobile apps, and digital payments. Across Africa, telcos like MTN, Airtel, Vodacom, and Orange are all experiencing the same structural trend: voice is becoming less important while data usage and fintech activity continue to grow rapidly.

Connectivity revenue at KES 197.9 billion ($1.53 billion) narrowly led M-PESA's KES 182.7 billion, keeping mobile data and fintech neck-and-neck as growth engines.

Telcos face a serious maths problem: voice revenue flatlines while network costs keep climbing. The only escape is driving enough data consumption to offset lower per-megabyte pricing. Safaricom proved the model works, but it required massive 4G and 5G investment, aggressive smartphone subsidies, and accepting margin pressure from promotional data offers.

For African banks partnering with telcos, this dynamic matters enormously. If telecom operators prioritize network expansion, fintech innovation may slow, easing some competitive pressure on banks. But if fintech becomes the dominant investment priority, underinvestment in network infrastructure could weaken connectivity quality and hurt the digital banking experience that banks themselves rely on. The ideal outcome for banks is strong telecom infrastructure without telco-led fintech platforms becoming overwhelmingly dominant.

CRYPTO

Opera-backed MiniPay crossed 15 million activated wallets, more than doubling from 13 million the previous year. The 123% growth extends its position as one of Africa's most widely used stablecoin payment apps. MiniPay launched in Nigeria in September 2023 as part of Opera Mini browser before becoming a standalone app in 2025, now operating in seven African markets. The platform competes with Bitget Wallet and UglyCash as users in countries with volatile currencies embrace dollar-denominated digital money for everyday payments.

Mobile-money operators in sub-Saharan Africa conducted $1.4 trillion in transactions in 2025, representing 66% of global mobile money activity according to GSMA. MiniPay's growth underscores how Africa has become a testing ground for crypto payments products that struggle to find product-market fit in developed markets. These apps bet that millions of consumers outside traditional banking systems will use dollar stablecoins to bypass costly infrastructure and currency depreciation.

Stablecoins are an interesting case study: they solve real African market problems (currency volatility, expensive cross-border payments) but they compete directly with mobile money operators who spent a decade building out distribution. Telcos like Safaricom and MTN won't sit and watch crypto wallets eat transaction volumes. For banks, the strategic choice is clear: integrate stablecoin rails before standalone crypto wallets capture your target customers, or wait and lose pricing power when customers can self-custody dollars outside the banking system. The likely endgame is likely not stablecoins winning or mobile money winning. It's likely incumbents integrating some form of local currency and dollar-denominated accounts. But as always timing matters. What’s the threshold here? If MiniPay reaches 30 million MAU (Monthly Active Users) before major banks offer dollar stablecoin accounts, customer acquisition costs will price traditional players out of the market. It seems like the window to act is measured in quarters, not years.

Know a colleague in fintech who would find this useful? Share your unique link and you’ll both get my 2026 Banking Trends PDF.

• Lesaka lifted full-year earnings guidance after demand-driven quarterly gains, with CEO Lincoln Mali citing strong transaction volumes across payment processing and merchant acquiring

• Discovery will pay members to improve sleep quality through Vitality rewards, using wearable device data to incentivize healthier sleep patterns and reduce long-term health insurance claims

• Airtel Nigeria became Airtel Africa's second-largest market by revenue per user, with ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) rising 41% year-on-year as tariff hikes and data demand offset currency depreciation

• Mastercard and Yellow Card announced plans to target stablecoin payments across EEMEA markets, integrating crypto rails into traditional card networks

• Visa and Mastercard joined Astrada's seed funding round, backing the cross-border payment infrastructure startup targeting emerging markets

• Anthropic formed an AI joint venture with Blackstone and Goldman Sachs, combining AI capabilities with financial sector distribution and capital deployment expertise

• Payment networks are preparing infrastructure for agentic commerce at scale, building rails for AI agents to autonomously initiate and complete transactions on behalf of users

• South Africa's draft exchange control regulations published April 17 would bring crypto assets into capital flow management framework, with R1 million fines and five-year jail terms for violations

• Bitget Wallet expanded crypto card availability to South Africa, allowing users to spend cryptocurrency at traditional point-of-sale terminals

• PayPal and Venmo may split as PayPal explores strategic options for its peer-to-peer payment subsidiary amid activist investor pressure

• RBC and BMO are in talks to sell Moneris to Verifone owner, potentially exiting Canada's largest payment processor after years of joint ownership

• PayPal, Mastercard and Visa face UK competition probe into cross-border payment fees and merchant service charges

• Kalshi's valuation soared to $22 billion following strong growth in prediction market trading volumes and regulatory approval for additional event contracts

• Mastercard is pushing virtual cards beyond payables into consumer use cases including subscription management and one-time purchase security

Stitch introduces buy-now-pay-later product

South African payments infrastructure startup Stitch launched a white-label buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) product that allows merchants to offer installment payments without building their own credit infrastructure. This is strictly a B2B-facing product unlike Payflex and Payjustnow which consumers interact with directly. Here, the consumer won’t see Stitch anywhere in the mix. The product integrates directly into Stitch's existing payment orchestration platform, which already processes bank-to-bank payments for over 1,000 merchants across South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya.

Unlike traditional BNPL providers that take on credit risk themselves, Stitch's model connects merchants with third-party lenders who underwrite and fund the installment loans. Merchants integrate once through Stitch's API and gain access to multiple BNPL providers without managing separate relationships. The platform handles payment collection, reconciliation, and settlement while lenders handle credit decisioning and risk management.

The launch comes as African BNPL adoption accelerates, particularly among younger consumers excluded from traditional credit. South Africa's BNPL market grew 47% in 2025 according to industry estimates, but fragmentation remains a challenge. Most merchants must integrate separately with each BNPL provider, creating technical debt and limiting consumer choice at checkout.

Stitch's orchestration approach mirrors the payment infrastructure model that succeeded in developed markets, where platforms like Stripe and Adyen aggregate multiple payment methods behind a single integration. For African merchants, the value proposition is straightforward: offer customers more payment options without the engineering overhead of managing multiple vendor relationships.

The product targets e-commerce and retail merchants in South Africa initially, with plans to expand to Nigeria and Kenya by Q3 2026. Stitch raised $25 million in Series A funding in 2023 and processes over $500 million in annual payment volume across its platform.

For CEOs evaluating digital spin-outs: The OPay versus Airtel split highlights an increasingly important strategic question: are you building a scalable fintech platform that global investors can value independently, or a digital business still too intertwined with legacy banking or telecom infrastructure? Naturally, the cleaner the separation, the easier it becomes to pursue premium technology valuations.

For product leaders evaluating BNPL: Stitch’s model reinforces where value may ultimately accrue in African payments - it’s not necessarily in owning the lending relationship, but in owning the orchestration layer connecting merchants, lenders, and payment infrastructure together. Platforms simplifying complexity may become more defensible than standalone financing products.

For treasury and FX teams: Stablecoin wallets are increasingly behaving like parallel financial infrastructure plays rather than just speculative crypto products. The category is still in its infancy, but if customers begin storing meaningful dollar balances outside the banking system, banks risk losing deposit float, foreign exchange revenue, and transactional visibility. The strategic response may be product innovation and integration rather than just resistance alone.

BRAIN TEASER ANSWER:

OPay: $4 billion ÷ 40 million users = $100 per customer

Airtel Money: $10 billion ÷ 54.1 million users = $185 per customer

Difference: $85 per customer (or 85% premium for Airtel Money)

This 85% valuation premium reflects what investors pay for multi-market infrastructure and telco distribution versus what we might call pure-play single-country risk.