A correction first: an earlier post on this site described Optasia Limited as a JSE-listed provider of classroom training and e-learning platforms. That was wrong. Optasia is an AI-powered fintech, headquartered in Dubai and listed on the JSE, that partners with banks and mobile network operators to extend microloans and airtime credit to customers across Africa, Asia and the Middle East who often have no other route to formal credit. The earlier post has been removed. This is the real story its reviewed interim results for the six months to 30 June 2026 actually tell.
The headline numbers
Group revenue rose 58% to $185.3 million. Adjusted EBITDA grew 45% to $77.9 million. Headline earnings per share climbed 50% to 2.79 US cents. The distributed value moving across Optasia’s platform, the total value of loans and airtime credit extended through its partners, rose 46% to $3.5 billion, a scale figure that matters more than it might look: it is the clearest sign of how much of the underlying lending activity actually runs through Optasia’s infrastructure rather than being a marketing number.
The growth is not evenly spread, and that unevenness is the real story. Microfinancing services, MFS, the loan side of the business, grew revenue 84% and now makes up roughly 72% of group revenue, up from 62% a year earlier. Airtime credit services, the original business Optasia built its name on, is still growing but is now clearly the smaller, slower half of the company. That shift matters for anyone trying to value the stock: a lender earns fundamentally different margins, and carries fundamentally different credit risk, than a company selling prepaid airtime on credit.
Why FirstRand keeps buying in
FirstRand’s relationship with Optasia has moved well past a passive stake. The banking group has been increasing its holding since Optasia’s JSE listing, and reporting this week put its position at just over a quarter of the company. For a bank that has spent years talking about reaching customers the traditional branch network cannot serve profitably, a controlling-adjacent stake in a fintech that already runs AI-driven credit scoring across multiple emerging markets is a faster route to that customer base than building the same capability internally.
Optasia has also been buying its way into adjacent markets rather than only growing organically. The company’s roughly R500 million acquisition of Finergi, an electricity credit specialist, extends the same instant-credit model from airtime and cash loans into prepaid electricity, a product category with its own large, underbanked customer base in South Africa and beyond. Three new country deployments went live in the period, in Gabon and South Sudan among them, and the company launched its first merchant lending product, a small-business-facing credit line rather than the consumer loans that have driven growth so far.
The share price tells a more complicated story than the results do
None of this growth has been a smooth ride for anyone who bought Optasia shares at listing. The stock priced at around R20, climbed to nearly R22.50 by February, then fell sharply, losing about 40% of its value to a low of R13.33 in late June, before recovering some ground. Even after that recovery, the share price sits roughly 30% below its listing price. A company can post 58% revenue growth and 50% HEPS growth and still have its stock trading below where it started, if the market had priced in even more aggressive expectations at listing, or simply lost patience with volatility in a business built on emerging-market consumer lending.
That gap, strong operating growth against a share price still underwater, is worth watching rather than resolving in either direction. Optasia has reaffirmed full-year guidance of 30% to 40% growth across revenue, adjusted EBITDA and normalised net income, which if delivered would put the interim period’s growth rate comfortably inside that range rather than as a one-off spike. Whether the market starts pricing that consistency back into the stock, or continues discounting it for the volatility already seen this year, is the question actual shareholders are now facing.
What this means beyond Optasia itself
For South African businesses watching the fintech-lending space, Optasia’s results are a useful data point on how fast AI-driven credit scoring is being deployed at scale in markets with limited traditional banking infrastructure, the same underbanked-customer opportunity UsPlus’s own new financial instrument is aimed at, on a smaller scale, back in South Africa. It is also a reminder that a JSE listing and a reviewed interim result do not, on their own, guarantee the market gets the story right immediately: a company can genuinely be executing well and still trade underwater for months while investors work out how much to trust the growth.
