AI-powered financial technology (fintech) company Optasia plans to undertake an initial public offering (IPO) to raise about R1.3-billion, while also listing on the JSE.

The company aims to drive financial empowerment by leveraging real-time data and its AI-led, in-house-built financial services platform to unlock financial opportunities for underbanked populations across emerging markets.

In line with this vision, Optasia is focused on scaling its operations through the continued expansion of its geographical footprint and the diversification of its product and service offerings, the company says in a statement.

“Today marks an important milestone for Optasia as we take a crucial step towards becoming a publicly listed company. From a single-country operation to one of the world’s largest fintechs of its kind, we have built a profitable, capital-light business that continues with purpose to scale,” says CEO Salvador Anglada.

Optasia has enabled financial inclusion across emerging markets for more than a decade and leverages its AI-powered platform to provide vital access to credit and financial services for millions of underserved customers.

“An IPO will allow us to accelerate our growth, raise our visibility as a global fintech and continue innovating to expand financial opportunity where it is needed most.”

The main purposes of the offering and admission are to provide Optasia with access to capital to support growth, both organically and through future potential acquisitions.

Additionally, the aim of the offering is to introduce new shareholders to enhance the liquidity and tradeability of the shares in a regulated market with a market-determined share price, while also providing an exit mechanism for existing shareholders who wish to sell.

The offering will also enhance the company’s public profile and overall market awareness, Anglada says.

Further, the company is also proposing a secondary share sale from existing shareholders to raise at least R5-billion. Optasia will not receive any proceeds from the sale of secondary shares by the selling shareholders, the company points out.

Optasia provides micro-financing solutions and airtime credit solutions. Its AI-powered financial services platform and its credit-decision algorithms process and analyse multiple customer data points, generating credit scoring and a credit decision.

As part of providing these services, Optasia enables instant access to financial solutions for millions of underbanked individuals across 38 countries.

To provide these services, the company works in partnership with its distribution partners, such as mobile network operators, mobile wallet operators and financial institutions, principally banks, but also some non-bank financial institutions, to enable financial access to its distribution partners’ end customers.

With its business-to-business-to-customers model and AI platform, it covers all financing aspects of micro-financing and airtime credit services, including scoring, financial decision-making, disbursements and collections, thereby enabling distribution partners and financial institutions to offer comprehensive financial access to retail and small and medium-sized enterprise customers.

Optasia's platform continuously analyses various unstructured data sets by extracting proprietary features to further enhance its decision-making outputs and gain a deeper understanding of each individual customer and the overall market in which the platform operates.

The AI engine is the core of the platform and uses information from multiple sources to generate more than 100 000 unique features for each customer. As a result, Optasia’s credit decision-making capabilities continually improve and enable network members to benefit from powerful flywheel effects.

As its network of distribution partners and financial institutions grows, the company serves additional customers and products, thereby improving and refining the underling models, which further benefits the overall network, the company says.

As more customer data is captured and analysed by Optasia’s AI platform, distribution partners and financial institutions are provided with the opportunity to refine and increase their product offerings, often resulting in greater customer uptake.

Being at the centre of this network and connecting all network participants enables the company to continuously analyse more data, assessing customer credit risk on a continuous basis, enhancing credit decisions and financial performance, the company states.

It collects, combines and leverages data related to end-customers, extracted through multiple sources in compliance with the data protection laws applicable in the jurisdictions in which the group currently operates in or will operate in the future, Optasia says.

Meanwhile, Optasia adheres to its own and external cybersecurity and data protection policies, including EU General Data Protection Regulations and International Organisation for Standardisation information security standard ISO-27001, via sophisticated infrastructure security, access control, data protection and privacy policies, the company states.

The company has several initiatives in place aimed at capturing the commercial momentum the group has been able to establish across its different markets since inception.

Optasia intends to execute its strategy of continued expansion by scaling organically across existing operations by increasing average ticket-lending size and deepening existing customer penetration, new market entries and new partnership growth within its existing geographic footprint.

Additionally, it is forging the next generation of value through the innovation of new business segments, products and ecosystems, and aims to grow globally into new high-opportunity geographies that have populations with unmet financial needs.

The company has an ecosystem of long-standing relationships with 49 distribution partners, including MTN, Airtel, Vodacom, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison and Jazz, among others, as well as with 13 financial institutions.

FINANCIAL METRICS
Established in December 2012, Optasia has developed a network of distribution partners and financial institutions, and has access to more than 860-million mobile subscribers.

With about 121-million active monthly users, it processes more than 32-million loan transactions a day, which results in an average distributed value of more than $13-million a day and a total distributed value of about $23-billion since 2016.

Since its founding, Optasia has consistently maintained positive cash flow and has not raised any primary capital, the company notes.

The company has 356 employees from 25 different countries across 15 offices worldwide. Its team has strong operational expertise and significant technical depth and includes 167 full-time engineers and data scientists dedicated to driving continuous platform innovation.

Further, Optasia's board of directors is committed to maintaining a consistent and sustainable dividend policy that balances shareholder returns with the group’s long-term strategic priorities.

It notes that prospective investors who intend to participate in the IPO should anticipate receiving dividends from the company from the 2027 financial year.

From 2027 onwards, Optasia is targeting a dividend payout ratio of 20% of headline earnings per share, subject to the group’s cash requirements, growth prospects and compliance with applicable laws. The company intends to declare and pay dividends each year for the foreseeable future.