When Optasia lists on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange later this year, the Dubai-based fintech will do more than raise R6.3 billion. It will give investors a stake in one of the most underestimated asset classes in the developing world: the financial lives of people once written off as unbankable.

Optasia’s business sits at the heart of an industry that has grown quietly beneath the radar of formal finance. Using artificial intelligence, it helps telecom operators decide who qualifies for micro-credit based on behavioural data rather than credit scores. Its clients, companies such as MTN, Airtel, and Orange, already serve hundreds of millions of people who use mobile phones as their wallets, savings accounts, and, increasingly, their banks.

Optasia provides the brainpower behind those systems, analysing patterns in airtime top-ups, call locations, and repayment histories to assess risk and enable instant loans that traditional banks could never process profitably.

The planned initial public offering (IPO) is the first of its kind: a public listing built on the infrastructure of prepaid phones and text messages. It formalises an informal financial network that now handles billions of small transactions a day and underscores the commercial value of data flowing through Africa’s mobile-money ecosystem.

Telcos as banks

Over the past two decades, telecom companies have done what banks could not, create low-cost, accessible financial systems for the poor. In 2010, only 37% of adults in emerging markets had access to formal banking, while more than half owned a mobile phone. Today, the World Bank’s 2021 Global Findex shows that 71% of adults in developing economies now hold an account, whether at a bank or through a mobile-money service. Much of that progress, however, has come from the latter.

By leveraging their networks and agent systems, telcos turned prepaid airtime platforms into de facto financial institutions. Services such as M-Pesa in Kenya, SmartMoney in the Philippines, and MTN MoMo in West Africa allowed users to deposit cash with local agents and send money via text. The corner shop became a micro-bank; the mobile wallet replaced the bank deposit book. Deposits were pooled in regulated trust accounts, but day-to-day transactions happened entirely through the phone network.

For customers like a market vendor in Nairobi, earning a few dollars a day, these services meant safety, convenience, and dignity. She could save small amounts, send money home instantly or borrow to buy produce. A branch-based bank would have rejected her for lack of collateral; a mobile operator could lend at near-zero marginal cost.

Why banks failed

Traditional banks were designed for scale, not small change. The costs of branches, staff, and paperwork made it impossible to serve low-income customers profitably. Mobile delivery cut those costs by as much as 70%.

Telecoms also enjoyed a trust advantage: in many countries, consumers recognised and relied on mobile brands more than bank brands. Where banks required forms and identification, telcos already knew their customers through SIM registration and daily usage data.

The result was what some economists call communal banking, a distributed network of agents and users pooling liquidity through digital ledgers. Regulators later legitimised these operations through “e-money” licences, turning telecoms into quasi-banks under the supervision of central banks.

The intelligence layer

As mobile finance matured, the challenge shifted from distribution to intelligence, deciding who should receive credit. That is where Optasia entered. Its algorithms scan thousands of data points: how often a person tops up airtime, where they use their phone, whether they repay previous advances on time. From this, the system builds a digital credit profile, enabling telcos to extend loans or data bundles automatically and deduct repayments from the next wallet deposit.

Founded in 2012, Optasia operates in 38 countries across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. It partners with 49 mobile operators and 13 financial institutions, serving 121 million users. The company processes 32 million microloan transactions daily and has disbursed more than $23 billion in credit since inception.

By embedding financial logic into telecom infrastructure, Optasia has become a quiet enabler of inclusion for over 120 million people. Its forthcoming IPO signals that investors now see the informal economy not as a frontier to be subsidised, but as a market to be valued.

The next leap

Yet competition is coming. Decentralised-finance and crypto-wallet startups promise the same peer-to-peer payments without reliance on telecom rails. For Africa, long accustomed to skipping stages of development, from no phones to mobiles, from no banks to mobile money, the next leap could be from mobile money to digital currencies.

Optasia’s listing marks a turning point in that journey. It is proof that the financial improvisations of the poor can evolve into investable infrastructure, and that in the emerging world, innovation continues to outpace institutions.