When Optasia, the analytics-driven credit technology company, rang the bell on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) on 4 November 2025, it cemented its position as one of the few Africa-focused fintechs to list on a major exchange that year.
But what has since emerged from the company’s newly released 2025 annual financial statements is the sheer financial toll of that achievement. Optasia spent $23.4m getting to market — a bill that consumed 31 cents of every dollar raised in its primary offering.
Formally incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, headquartered in Dubai, and heavily focused on Africa, Optasia provides credit technology services to mobile network operators. Its platform underpins airtime advance services and mobile financial services (MFS), through which nano-loans are disbursed to end-users via partner microfinance institutions.
While the underlying business is scaling rapidly, the cost of going public reveals the steep price of jurisdictional complexity and executive crystallisation events.
The $23.4m bill
The IPO cost is not a single line item in Optasia’s accounts, but rather split across the balance sheet and the profit and loss (P&L) statement.
- $14.4m deducted from equity: This comprises costs directly attributable to the issuance of new shares, such as underwriting fees, registration charges, legal counsel for the issuance, and stamp duties. Under accounting standards, these were treated as a reduction of equity, dropping the net proceeds of the primary issuance from $75.2m to $60.7m.
- $9m expensed through the P&L: This covers advisory, structuring, due diligence, and consultancy work that could not be cleanly attributed to the share issuance. It sat as the second-largest single line item in the company’s operating expenses for the year, behind employee benefits.
Together, these costs swallowed 31% of gross primary proceeds.
IPO Cost Breakdown
Cost ComponentAccounting TreatmentAmount (USD)Direct issuance costsDeducted from share premium (equity)$14.4mAdvisory & legal feesExpensed through P&L$9.0mTotal IPO cost — $23.4mGross primary proceeds — $75.2mNet proceeds — $60.7mIPO cost as % of gross proceeds — 31.1%
To put the P&L drag into context: Optasia reported $43.1m in net profit for 2025. The $9m advisory charge alone wiped out roughly 21% of that net profit.
The heavy advisory toll is largely explained by the company’s complex footprint. Optasia is registered in the BVI, headquartered in Dubai, audited by Ernst & Young’s Abu Dhabi branch, and listed in Johannesburg. Navigating a four-way jurisdictional IPO inherently inflates legal and structuring fees.
What the money bought
The primary offering of 68.5m new shares was just one part of the JSE transaction. The listing served primarily as a liquidity event for early backers.
Simultaneously, existing shareholders sold 273.9m shares to institutional investors. In a concurrent off-market deal, certain shareholders also offloaded a 20.1% stake to FirstRand Investment Holdings, one of South Africa’s largest financial groups. FirstRand is now Optasia’s second-largest shareholder, sitting behind founding entity Chronos Capital, which retains a 30% stake.
Despite the high fees, the IPO successfully transformed Optasia’s balance sheet. Total equity expanded 4.5x in a single year, jumping from $27.7m at the end of 2024 to $124.6m by 31 December 2025. The gearing ratio fell from a heavy 3.19x to a manageable 0.86x, though the company still carries $106.8m in borrowings.
The hidden cost: Executive incentives
The $23.4m listing bill does not include the executive payouts triggered by the IPO. The JSE debut counted as a ‘materialisation event’ under Optasia’s incentive schemes, crystalising several major obligations:
- Incoming CEO Salvador Anglada received $2.6m in equity-settled share-based payments, accelerated in full upon listing.
- The outgoing CEO received a $1.5m cash exit payment, plus an additional $1m in share awards.
- Executive Chairman Bassim Said Haidar received total compensation of $4.4m for 2025, comprising standard remuneration, share-based payments, and ‘other benefits’.
In total, remuneration for the three named directors hit $8.2m in the IPO year.
The underlying engine
Beneath the heavy listing costs, the core business is growing aggressively. Total revenue jumped 75.5% in 2025 to $265.4m.
This was entirely driven by the Mobile Financial Services (MFS) arm — the nano-loan facilitation engine. MFS revenue more than doubled to $167.5m, now making up 63% of the group’s total income. Optasia facilitated an immense $2.3bn in nano-loans in 2025, up from $968m the prior year.
Africa remains the company’s engine room, generating 88.5% of total revenue. Ghana has emerged as a particularly lucrative market; Optasia’s 70%-owned Ghanaian subsidiary pulled in $48.5m in 2025 (up from just $7.4m in 2024), making it responsible for 18% of the entire group’s top line.
The risks: Credit exposure and withholding taxes
The central risk to Optasia’s model is its financial guarantee exposure. The company indemnifies telecom and microfinance partners against subscriber defaults. At year-end, total credit exposure stood at $317.9m. To cover this, Optasia holds an expected credit loss provision of $33.2m, and the provision charge ran at $65.2m through the 2025 P&L — the single largest operating cost for the business.
Another growing pressure point is withholding taxes (WHT). Because Optasia operates across multiple African jurisdictions from an offshore base, local telecoms must deduct taxes directly from Optasia’s service fee invoices before paying them.
As the business scaled in 2025, withholding taxes quadrupled from $2.8m to $10.1m. Because these amounts are non-recoverable in most of Optasia’s operating jurisdictions, the company’s effective total tax burden jumped to approximately 27%, up from 20% in 2024. As the MFS portfolio continues to scale across sub-Saharan Africa, managing this tax leakage will be critical for maintaining margins.