Onafriq Tried to Sell Baxi Before Shutting Nigeria Agency Business

Onafriq was negotiating the sale of its entire Nigerian agency banking operation before announcing the closure of Baxi, its agent banking business, according to the company’s audited financial statements.

Onafriq announced Baxi’s shutdown on October 16, 2026. The financial statements say Onafriq Nigeria Payments Limited had entered into a non-binding memorandum of terms with an unnamed purchaser for the proposed divestment of the business.

The proposed transaction covered 100% of the agency business and related operations. It remained subject to a definitive asset purchase agreement, and the identity of the prospective buyer was not disclosed.

Sale talks remained unresolved

When Onafriq’s accounts were approved on July 29, 2026, negotiations were still in progress. The company said it could not reliably estimate the proposed transaction’s structure, timing or financial impact at that stage.

The available information does not establish whether the sale was completed after the accounts were approved.

Onafriq attributed Baxi’s closure to inflation, the depreciation of the naira, higher operating costs, narrower margins and the increasing use of alternative payment methods, including account-to-account transfers. The company said the economics of running an offline agent network had become unsustainable.

Dare Okoudjou, Onafriq’s founder and chief executive, said: “We entered Nigeria with conviction and commitment, but did not achieve the outcome we set out for.”

Declining financial performance

Onafriq’s agency services revenue fell 56%, from $30.4 million in 2023 to $13.4 million in 2024, according to its financial report. Agency services costs declined from $17 million to $8.7 million over the same period, while gross profit dropped from $13.4 million to $4.7 million, a 65% decline.

The business generated approximately $35 in gross profit for every $100 of revenue in 2024, compared with $44 per $100 in 2023.

Onafriq also wrote off $4.56 million in remaining goodwill associated with its Nigerian payments business in 2024, following a $2.4 million write-off in 2023. The filings linked the write-offs to a decline in the value the company expected to recover.

In July 2026, Onafriq Nigeria Payments Limited had outstanding overdrafts of ₦13.8 billion owed to Zenith Bank and ₦6.1 billion owed to Stanbic IBTC Bank. The combined amount was ₦19.9 billion.

Competition in Nigeria’s PoS market

The shutdown came as Nigeria’s point-of-sale market continued to expand, although competition also intensified. Nigeria’s PoS transaction value rose 79% to ₦18.78 trillion in the first quarter of 2026, according to the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System.

NIBSS data also showed that PoS transaction volumes increased from 1.4 billion to 1.5 billion in 2024, while deployed terminals rose by 127%. The number of terminals increased from 2.45 million at the end of 2023 to 5.56 million at the end of 2024.

Moniepoint reported more than 800,000 PoS terminals in Nigeria at the end of 2024 and more than one million active terminals by 2026. The company also said it served more than six million businesses in 2025.

Baxi, which entered the market through MFS Africa’s acquisition of Capricorn Digital, had more than 460,000 agents as of 2025. The acquisition was announced in 2021 and completed in March 2022 after approval from the Central Bank of Nigeria.

Agents transferred to another bank

Following the shutdown announcement, Onafriq said it had transferred Baxi’s agents to another principal bank. It gave the agents 30 days to move their funds to a principal bank of their choice.

Onafriq said it would continue operating in Nigeria through its payments network and card-issuing services, even as it exited the offline agency banking operation.