Nigeria’s Invisible Export: How Optasia, MTN and Airtel Made ₦2 Trillion from Nigerian Subscribers Without Building Nigerian Wealth
When Optasia, formerly known as Channel VAS, began operating in Nigeria in 2014, it was celebrated as a fintech innovator bringing digital convenience to Africa’s largest mobile market. Its idea was deceptively simple: provide airtime and small credit advances to MTN subscribers who ran out of balance, then recover repayment on their next recharge. For millions of Nigerians, it felt like progress — instant microcredit available through a handset. But a decade later, the picture looks very different. The real wealth created by this model does not stay in Nigeria.
Optasia is not a Nigerian company. It is a foreign fintech platform offering AI-based lending and scoring services to telecom operators across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Its biggest and most profitable market is Nigeria, where MTN, the continent’s largest mobile operator, serves as both partner and distribution channel. Since entering the country, Optasia’s transaction volumes have grown exponentially, generating vast sums from Nigerian users. Industry estimates suggest that between 2019 and 2023 alone, Nigerian subscribers received over ₦4.7 trillion in airtime and nano-loans through the Optasia-MTN system, producing an estimated ₦560 billion in interest income. In 2023, the platform processed about 46 billion micro-advances worth ₦1.4 trillion, yielding roughly ₦210 billion in interest. These figures, while staggering, tell only half the story — because most of that income was earned offshore.
Despite processing trillions of naira in transactions through Nigerian telecom networks, Optasia does not hold a Nigerian financial licence. It operates through MTN’s infrastructure, using the network as a distribution layer while conducting its data analytics, revenue booking, and risk modelling abroad. The firm’s local footprint is minimal, often limited to a small compliance or liaison office. The algorithms, servers, and banking relationships that underpin the entire enterprise remain outside Nigeria’s jurisdiction. What looks like innovation on the surface is, in practice, a sophisticated form of digital extraction — a system where foreign platforms monetise local data and demand while leaving the host country with little more than operational residue.
Even more troubling is the fact that, despite processing trillions of naira in loans, *none of this credit activity is reported to Nigeria’s licensed credit bureaus* such as CRC Credit Bureau or FirstCentral. This means that millions of Nigerians who consistently borrow and repay these airtime loans *build no formal credit history* — they remain invisible to banks, mortgage providers, and legitimate financial institutions. The very citizens whose repayment patterns sustain these foreign platforms are denied the opportunity to convert that discipline into real creditworthiness. What could have been an on-ramp to financial inclusion has become a closed circuit of extraction.
Regulatory oversight has not caught up with this reality. The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) regulates the telecom sector, while the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) oversees lending and payment services. Yet Optasia sits between both domains, in a grey zone where neither regulator exercises direct authority. The result is a multi-billion-naira industry operating beyond the reach of financial supervision and beyond the scope of domestic taxation.
The implications are profound. Nigerian subscriber data fuels Optasia’s predictive algorithms, but those models are built, owned, and refined abroad. The loan fees and commissions earned from each transaction are often booked as “technology service” or “licence” payments to offshore entities, allowing profits to escape local taxation through intra-group transfer pricing. Without a Nigerian licence, the company’s lending practices are not bound by domestic consumer-protection laws, and its use of sensitive personal data is subject only to indirect oversight. At the same time, the absence of local research or development means no Nigerian coders, no domestic IP, and no local shareholding benefit from the billions generated on Nigerian soil.
If Nigeria had captured even ten percent of the estimated interest income generated by these operations — about ₦56 billion over five years — that amount could have financed a nationwide fintech accelerator programme, supported rural broadband expansion, or strengthened regulatory capacity in the digital economy. Instead, it flows outward, enriching global investors and reinforcing Nigeria’s role as a supplier of data and demand rather than a builder of digital wealth.
Other nations have faced similar challenges and responded with assertive policy. India, for example, mandates that digital-lending firms host their data locally, partner with licensed domestic financial institutions, and comply fully with onshore capital and tax requirements. Indonesia imposes strict local-incorporation rules, caps foreign ownership in peer-to-peer lending, and requires public disclosure of revenue-sharing agreements between telecom operators and their digital partners. These measures are not protectionist; they are pragmatic. They recognise that innovation without value retention merely transfers prosperity abroad.
Nigeria’s policymakers can take a similar approach. The time for permissive digital laissez-faire has passed. The country must establish clear rules for telco-embedded credit and AI-based financial services, requiring that any entity serving Nigerian subscribers be locally licensed, partly Nigerian-owned, and subject to the same tax and data-protection standards as domestic players. Data processing for Nigerian consumers must occur within Nigerian jurisdiction under the Nigeria Data Protection Act, and telecom agreements should be publicly disclosed to ensure fair revenue sharing and consumer benefit. Without such reforms, Nigeria’s digital economy will remain a pipeline for exporting value, not building it.
Optasia’s rise is both a testament to Nigeria’s economic scale and a warning about its vulnerabilities. With more than 200 million mobile subscribers, the country represents one of the world’s richest laboratories for digital finance. Yet Nigerians remain spectators in their own success. Their data trains foreign algorithms, their consumption drives foreign valuations, and their economy receives only the thinnest fraction of the gains.
To change this trajectory, Nigeria must move beyond celebrating foreign participation as an end in itself. Investment is valuable only when it deepens domestic capacity and retains local wealth. The choice is not between openness and protectionism, but between dependency and partnership. The principle should be simple: if global firms wish to profit from Nigeria’s digital scale, they must build with Nigeria, not merely on Nigeria. Otherwise, we risk exporting opportunity and importing dependency — one airtime loan at a time.
