Fact check: Did Optasia make $3 billion from Nigeria? Here is what its audited accounts actually show

A claim that Bassim Haidar’s company, Optasia, made $3.18 billion from Nigeria alone in 2025 by lending airtime and data to Nigerian telecom subscribers has been circulating on social media, including from accounts with large followings and reported by popular media platforms.

One widely shared post frames this figure as the company’s earnings from Nigeria specifically, tying it to the regulatory standoff between the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) and Nigerian telecom operators over digital lending.

The claim is false on two counts.

The $3.18 billion figure is not revenue, and it is not Nigeria-specific. Optasia’s own audited consolidated financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2025, show what the company actually earned, where it earned it, and what that $3.18 billion figure really represents.

Read the full analysis below:

What Optasia’s audited accounts actually say

Optasia (formally Channel VAS Investments Limited) was listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in November 2025. Its FY2025 consolidated financial statements were audited by Ernst & Young and approved by the board on March 13, 2026.

Total group revenue for 2025 was $265.357 million, up from $151.191 million in 2024. That is the entire group, across every market Optasia operates in, not Nigeria alone. The figure is broken down by service line as follows:

• Mobile Financial Services contributed $167.532 million
• Airtime credit service contributed $96.857 million
• Missed Call Notification Service contributed $968,000

Geographically, the company discloses revenue by region rather than by individual country. Nigeria’s contribution is folded into that Africa-wide figure and is not broken out separately anywhere in the audited statements.

Africa as a whole, not Nigeria specifically, accounted for $234.805 million of 2025 revenue. The Middle East contributed $5.124 million, and Europe and Asia contributed $25.428 million.

So where does $3.18 billion come from?

It is in the Note 6(i) of the financial statements, and it is not revenue at all.

It is the total airtime credit advanced to subscribers of telecom operators across the entire group during the year: $3,176.34 million in 2025, up from $2,829.2 million in 2024. This is the gross volume of airtime and data that Optasia’s technology facilitated as credit on behalf of telecom operators, not money the company kept.

Of that volume, Africa accounted for $2,992.501 million, Europe and Asia for $96.129 million, and the Middle East for $87.710 million. Again, this is a continent-wide figure covering every African market Optasia serves, not a Nigeria-only number.

Optasia’s actual revenue from this activity is the service fee it earns for facilitating the credit and indemnifying telecom operators against subscriber defaults, not the value of the credit advanced. That fee, the airtime credit service revenue line, was $96.857 million for the whole group in 2025. The mechanics of how this fee is recognised are explained in Note 4 of the accounts:

Optasia earns an agreed share of the service fee charged by telecom operators to subscribers on advances granted, and this is accounted for as a financial guarantee contract fee under IFRS 9, recognised over the indemnification period rather than upfront.

The confusion in the viral claim appears to stem from conflating “volume of credit advanced” with “revenue earned,” and then further conflating a group-wide, multi-country figure with a single-country one. Both errors compound each other. The real revenue figure is roughly 80 times smaller than the claimed figure, and the claimed figure itself describes the wrong thing.

What we can confirm about Nigeria specifically

The audited statements do contain some Nigeria-specific data points, though nothing close to $3 billion.

In the trade receivables breakdown by country (Note 24), Nigeria shows gross trade receivables of $7.733 million as at December 31, 2025, up from $3.798 million in 2024. Trade receivables represent amounts already invoiced to customers, a small fraction of the group’s overall receivables book, and an even smaller fraction of group revenue.

Optasia also operates several Nigerian subsidiaries, including Nairtime Nigeria Limited and Xtra MFS Nigeria Limited, both wholly owned. Notably, the financial statements disclose that effective January 1, 2025, the functional currency of Nairtime Holdings Limited, a subsidiary of the group, was changed from Nigerian Naira to US Dollar, a change management says was made to align reporting with the subsidiary’s economic environment.

Beyond these line items, the audited accounts do not provide a standalone Nigeria revenue or profit figure.

Optasia discloses revenue by broad geographic region (Africa, Middle East, Europe and Asia) and operates as a single reportable segment under IFRS 8, meaning it does not break out country-level profitability anywhere in its financial reporting.

Why this matters: the FCCPC dispute

The viral claim did not appear in a vacuum. It surfaced amid a genuine and ongoing regulatory fight over Nigeria’s airtime and data lending market, the same market in which Optasia’s technology platform operates behind the scenes for telecom operators like MTN and Airtel.

In July 2025, the FCCPC introduced the Digital, Electronic, Online or Non-Traditional (DEON) Consumer Lending Regulations, aimed at curbing predatory digital lending practices, including harassment, hidden fees, and abusive debt recovery tactics that had become common among unregulated loan apps.

The regulations classified airtime and data advances as a form of consumer lending and required operators to register, disclose terms clearly, and engage at least two service intermediaries for activation, one of which must be Nigerian-owned. The rules also explicitly prohibited exclusivity arrangements and conduct amounting to abuse of dominance.

Optasia Group CEO, Salvador Anglada

That last point is central to why this market structure matters. Industry estimates from the Association of Licensed Telecoms Operators of Nigeria put the entire airtime credit ecosystem at between ₦300 billion and ₦400 billion annually, a market that had for years been effectively controlled by a small number of telecom operators and their exclusive technology partners.

The new rules were designed, in the FCCPC’s own words, to address “exclusionary arrangements” and open the market to competition, including licenced local fintechs and banks now offering airtime and data loans through their own USSD platforms.

The rollout has been contentious. MTN Nigeria suspended its XtraTime service in April 2026 over compliance concerns, prompting WASPAN, the Wireless Application Service Providers Association of Nigeria, to sue the FCCPC, arguing the new rules infringed on territory belonging to the Nigerian Communications Commission.

A Lagos Federal High Court granted an interim injunction restraining enforcement, and the matter remains before the courts as of this writing, with the FCCPC contesting the injunction while telecom operators like Airtel and Globacom have already moved to restore services.

Whatever the courts ultimately decide, the underlying push is toward breaking up a market once dominated by a handful of incumbent arrangements. That matters regardless of how large or small Optasia’s actual revenue turns out to be, because concentrated control over a service used by an estimated 40 million Nigerians for basic connectivity is a competition and consumer protection issue on its own terms.

But that argument stands on its own merits. It does not require, and is not strengthened by, an invented $3 billion figure that audited financial statements do not support.