OPay and Nigeria’s Mobile Money Wars

Digitizing payments in Nigeria and Africa

This piece was originally published on the newsletter Emergent.

Fintech has proved to be one of the most fertile categories for entrepreneurs to innovate in globally over the past decade. Finance is the engine that powers an economy both at an individual level — bank accounts, mortgages and credit — and at a business level — payment processing, loans, point-of-sales systems. Fintech’s tremendous popularity as a category for entrepreneurs has been driven by the huge unbanked populations across countries globally, the dominance of cash as a method of transacting worldwide and the limited access most people — even those with bank accounts — have to financial services.

In particular, the continent of Africa has been simultaneously a laggard in financial inclusion and a global pioneer in specific categories of fintech, particularly mobile payments where Kenya’s MPesa has become the best in-class mobile money product globally. In fact over half of the world’s mobile money products are based in Africa.

One of the most exciting fintech startups globally today is the Nigerian mobile money startup OPay. Uniquely Opay was incubated and initially funded by the Norwegian internet browsing company Opera, one of the most unique origin stories for a…