6 African fintechs heading toward an IPO and where they stand

African fintechs are lining up for the stock market, and most of them aren’t listing at home. Over the past year, a wave of the continent’s largest payment and mobile money companies has moved from private funding rounds toward public listings. 

Investor appetite for proven, profitable digital finance businesses and a search for liquidity that Africa’s stock exchanges have often struggled to provide are driving this. The result is a cluster of high-profile IPO processes unfolding at once, each at a different stage and aimed at a different exchange.

Several of the fintechs in this pipeline are targeting international exchanges, particularly companies with ambitions to raise capital beyond their home markets.

Egypt’s MNT-Halan is the rare exception, betting on a local listing, and telecom-backed mobile money businesses like Airtel Money and MTN’s MoMo are taking the scale they built across dozens of African markets straight to international investors instead.  The reasons vary, but limited market depth and liquidity constraints on African exchanges, and the pull of deeper capital pools abroad, run through nearly every case.

From a deal that has already priced to ones still years away, here are 6 African fintechs heading toward an IPO in 2026, and where each one currently stands on the road to going public.

Airtel Money

Airtel Money, the mobile money arm of Airtel Africa, has come the farthest of any company on this list. Its London Stock Exchange IPO was priced on the first day in October 2026 at a $7 billion valuation, below the $8–9 billion the company had originally guided toward, raising at least $800 million through the sale of existing shares. 

The business operates across 14 African markets, serves more than 54 million customers, and ranks as the continent’s third-largest mobile money operator by transaction value, behind Safaricom’s M-Pesa and MTN’s MoMo. 

Airtel Money’s revenue grew 36.3% in reported currency, with underlying EBITDA reaching $689 million, numbers the company used to pitch investors on a business shifting away from cash-based agent transactions toward broader digital payments.

MNT-Halan

Egyptian fintech unicorn MNT-Halan has formally filed to list 20% of its shares on the Egyptian Exchange, with the listing expected around October 2026. 

The company, valued at $1.4 billion, is the country’s largest non-bank micro-lender, having disbursed roughly 178 billion Egyptian pounds (about $6.1 billion) in loans since its founding in 2018. Its loan book is nearing $1 billion, built through a hybrid model of 1,200 physical distribution points across 25 Egyptian governorates combined with digital channels.

Ahead of the listing, MNT-Halan raised $82 million through three separate bond tranches to fund continued lending. Unlike every other company on this list, it’s heading for a local exchange rather than an international one, a deliberate bet that Egypt’s market can support a fintech unicorn where others have chosen to list abroad.

MTN MoMo

Rather than a single IPO, MTN’s mobile money business, MoMo, is taking a country-by-country route toward public listings. In Uganda, shareholders have approved folding MoMo into a new entity, MTN New FinCo, which is targeting a listing on the Uganda Securities Exchange within three to five years. 

Ghana has gone further, formally completing its own MoMo spin-off into a standalone company, MobileMoney Ltd, in March 2026, with leadership targeting a Ghana Stock Exchange listing in a similar three-to-five-year window. 

In Nigeria, MTN has taken a different first step, spinning off 60% of its fintech subsidiaries, MoMo Payment Service Bank and Y’ello Digital Financial Services, to MTN Group Fintech B.V. in a deal worth roughly ₦152 billion ($110.5 million), though no public listing timeline has yet been set for the Nigerian business specifically.

OPay

Nigeria’s OPay launched as a super-app offering ride-hailing, food delivery and bus-hailing alongside payments, before narrowing its focus to financial services. Backed by SoftBank Vision Fund, Sequoia Capital China, IDG Capital and Meituan’s venture arm, OPay raised a $400 million Series C in August 2021 that valued it at $2 billion and made it a unicorn.

Its valuation has climbed since. A securities filing by Opera, which holds roughly 9.5% of OPay, valued that stake at $294.6 million in April 2026, implying a total valuation of about $3.1 billion. 

Opera assigned an 85% probability to OPay completing an IPO within two years in that filing, though it stressed this was a valuation input for its own accounts rather than a market forecast. It was later reported that OPay was working with Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan on a US listing targeting a $4 billion valuation, with shares potentially sold before the end of 2026.

OPay has reportedly also been considering a Nigerian Exchange listing, which could run as a dual listing alongside the US IPO rather than instead of it. Standard Bank Group, Africa’s largest bank by assets, is separately said to be in talks to acquire a pre-IPO stake. OPay now serves more than 50 million users and processes roughly $12 billion in transactions monthly. As with every company on this list, OPay has not made an official statement confirming its IPO timeline.

PalmPay

PalmPay launched with a $40 million seed round led by Transsion, followed by a $100 million Series A in 2021 from AfricInvest, Chuangshi Capital and Trust Capital. The company says it reached profitability in 2025, and now serves more than 35 million registered users and roughly 1 million business clients, alongside a newer smartphone-financing business in Tanzania and Bangladesh.

In August 2026, PalmPay prepared for a Hong Kong listing, seeking to raise about $200 million in a round that would value the company above $1 billion, formally making it a unicorn. 

The move follows an earlier agreement PalmPay signed with Hong Kong’s Office for Attracting Strategic Enterprises, making the city the base for its operations beyond Africa. 

PalmPay’s choice of Hong Kong reflects its ownership ties to Asia: Transsion, NetEase and chipmaker MediaTek, another investor, are all Asia-based, and Transsion itself has separately renewed its own Hong Kong IPO application. PalmPay has not made an official statement confirming its IPO plans.

Tyme Group

South Africa’s Tyme Group, which runs TymeBank locally and GoTyme in the Philippines, is on a longer runway toward the public markets. The company raised $250 million in a Series D round led by Brazilian neobank Nubank in 2024, valuing it at $1.5 billion.

Tyme’s leadership has discussed plans for a US listing by 2028, alongside a secondary listing in South Africa. The group’s combined customer base has grown past 17 million, split between roughly 11 million TymeBank customers in South Africa and 6.5 million GoTyme customers in the Philippines.

Read also: Airtel Money set for London IPO, seeks $800 million raise