The growing digitisation culture and ecosystem for the emerging fin-tech industry has attracted many big players in the past few years.

One such addition to the list of fin-techs is Soft Bank-backed (a Japanese investment giant) OPay which is here to make its mark in Pakistan's digital payment industry.

Since its launch in 2018, the company has marked over 160 million users and 300,000 POS acquiring merchants in the emerging African countries market; the company obtained its unicorn status in August 2021.

The latest valuation at $2 billion USD comes after it managed to raise a whopping $400 million USD in new financing led by SoftBank. This is considered to be the largest fundraise by any company in terms of size and value, thereby allowing OPay to make its way into another largely unbanked market: Pakistan.

OPay made major contributions to Nigerian cash-based retail economy turnaround into the digital payments retail economy. OPay invested in technology and building of the infrastructure for converting these cash-based merchants into digital payment accept merchants.

OPay is all set to introduce its services to Pakistan as the country enjoys similar economy and payment challenges as experienced by the company in the African market.

OPay Pakistan's Vice President, Zeb Khan detailed the platform's vision and future plans for the Pakistani market.

"OPay plans multimillion dollar direct investment in Pakistan, creating more than 2000 IT professional jobs in the country. OPay has setup its offices in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad and rapidly hiring professionals form the payment industry. OPay is planning to train and establish country’s largest fleet of professionals", says Zeb Khan.

He added, "OPay’s unique business model of introducing the concept of VAS (Value-Added Services) POS acquiring merchant. These VAS-POS acquiring merchants not only will be able to accept any card (debit/credit) and digital payments (QR, Digital Wallet) from consumers but also will be offering the VAS services like bill payments, mobile top up, cash-in, cash-out and money transfer to their customers. An acquiring merchant will be able to attract the extra customer traffic and revenue for his business."

OPay sees Pakistan as the most important market in the coming future as there is big space to work in digitisation of the economy.

Within the upcoming year, OPay plans to deploy 100,000 smart POS devices which will equip these merchants to accept all kinds of payments and offer the VAS services to not only bank account holder customers but also the cash-based customers.

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