Nigeria’s biggest initial public offering (IPO) should be a major payday for the fintechs helping investors buy shares. Instead, several of them are charging customers ₦0 because they see the Dangote Refinery offer as a customer-acquisition opportunity.

Dangoteinery opened its ₦2.15 trillion ($1.62 billion) public offering on September 14. Investment platforms including Bamboo, Cowrywise, and PiggyVest are not charging users direct transaction fees for buying the shares.

The fintechs are waiving charges such as brokerage, stamp duty, trade alerts, and Value-Added Tax. The bigger prize, they believe, is the customer brought onto their platforms.

Dangote Refinery is offering 4.1 billion shares at ₦525 ($0.39*) each and plans to raise about ₦2.15 trillion ($1.62 billion) from the public by October 13. That would make it Nigeria’s biggest public share sale.

For comparison, MTN Nigeria raised ₦111.75 billion ($293.31 million at ₦381/$) in 2021 through a public offering on the Nigerian exchange. In 2014, Seplat, an indigenous oil and gas operator, raised about $535 million through a dual listing on the London Stock Exchange and the Nigerian Stock Exchange.

Dangote Refinery’s minimum subscription is 10 shares, worth ₦5,250 ($3.95), and the company is targeting 10 million retail investors.

The last Nigerian public offer to generate comparable attention was MTN Nigeria’s 2021 offering, through which MTN Group reduced its shareholding in the company by 3.25 percentage points. The offer was oversubscribed by 139.7% and attracted 126,720 retail investors. It was also Nigeria’s first digital public offering.

MTN used PrimaryOffer, a digital platform, with payments processed by Flutterwave. More than 89% of retail offer subscribers applied through the platform, while 114,938 new Central Securities Clearing System (CSCS) accounts were opened by first-time investors.

MTN demonstrated the reach of a digital offering. Dangote is attempting to take that model further.

The company approved more than 30 fintechs—including Bamboo, Cowrywise, Flutterwave, Moniepoint, Paga, Payaza, PiggyVest, and Vetiva Invest—as channels for the IPO. The official IPO site also lists banks and mobile-money operators, including MTN MoMo.

For the past decade, Nigerian fintechs have focused on speed and convenience. They have become alternatives to banks during service disruptions and, in many cases, have replaced traditional banks as the primary financial interface for millions of Nigerians.

They have also lowered the barriers to services such as lending, savings, and stock investment. Users can now buy shares from their phones with amounts that traditional brokers might once have considered too small to serve profitably.

Between January and May 2026, retail participation in the Nigerian stock market increased 138.76% year on year, driven by a new generation of investors using mobile applications to access the market. Domestic retail investors traded ₦2.86 trillion ($2.15 billion) in equities during that period.

Dangote is betting on these applications to achieve something unprecedented: raising ₦2.15 trillion ($1.62 billion) from the public.

Why fintechs are waiving fees

The immediate arrangement is straightforward: customers pay no transaction fees, while the fintech gives up potential revenue from each purchase. The strategy is to use the fee waiver as an incentive to bring a funded customer onto the platform and then generate more value from that relationship over time.

An illustrative fee assumption of 1.5% shows the potential value of the waived charges, but it is not a universal IPO fee. Actual charges vary by provider and transaction. Some charges may be statutory or payable to other market participants, so the full 1.5% should not be interpreted as fintech revenue.

Under the calculation, whole shares are priced at ₦525 each, and the illustrative 1.5% charge is applied to the value of the shares purchased. Any amount that cannot buy a whole share remains unused.

On the minimum subscription of 10 shares, worth ₦5,250, an illustrative 1.5% charge would come to roughly ₦79 — a measure of how little direct revenue rides on a small-ticket purchase compared with the value of a funded, investing customer.

Fees are normally important to fintech business models. These companies process large volumes and take a small percentage from transactions, but Cowrywise, Bamboo, and PiggyVest charge no fees when users buy Dangote shares. The platforms had spent months running campaigns encouraging customers to participate in the IPO, so charging a small fee would have been expected.

The fintechs, however, are not participating for charity. The Dangote IPO has an estimated ₦41.49 billion ($31.19 million) set aside for offer expenses. That money is not exclusively for fintechs; it will also cover the costs of issuing houses and other professional parties involved in the offer. Fintechs will receive a portion subject to their negotiated terms.

Even so, the more valuable prize is not the fee from processing a single IPO transaction. It is the customer.

A fintech can spend millions of naira persuading someone to download its application, complete know-your-customer checks, fund an account, and make a transaction. The Dangote IPO has compressed that entire customer-acquisition process into one event.

In the week before the IPO, Bamboo opened more than 236,000 new accounts. Of those accounts, 64%, or 152,000, were funded and trading within the same week. The seven-day figure exceeded the startup’s best monthly signup performance: 172,000 new accounts in May.

When the IPO opened on September 14, Bamboo experienced a surge in traffic that it struggled to handle. Cowrywise reported a similar spike. Four hours after the 8 a.m. launch, more than ₦21 billion ($15.78 million) had been raised across roughly 38,000 transactions.

“As anticipated, the IPO launch generated a significant surge in traffic today, which resulted in some slower-than-usual response times for about an hour, after which full service was restored,” a Cowrywise spokesperson told TechCabal.

For many of the participating fintechs, the IPO functions as a customer-acquisition channel within a capital-market transaction.

“The IPO really helps for brand awareness and customer acquisition,” said Babatunde Akin-Moses, chief executive officer of Sycamore Capital Group, one of the listed fintechs.

A customer who downloads Bamboo to buy Dangote shares could later become a regular stock investor. Someone who opens a Cowrywise account for the IPO could eventually purchase a mutual fund. Others who discover a fintech through the offer could use its savings, payments, investment, or other financial services.

The immediate transaction may produce no direct fee, but the customer could revenue long after the IPO closes.

A larger retail-investor market

Dangote Refinery aims to attract 10 million retail investors and distribute ownership of the company, albeit in small portions, among average Nigerians.

“What we are trying to achieve is to make sure our drivers, cooks, servants, and everybody have the opportunity of having stakes in the refinery,” Aliko Dangote, Chief Executive of Dangote Industries Limited, said on Monday.

Nigeria currently has about 2.7 million retail investors. In May 2026, Jude Chiemeka, managing director of Nigerian Exchange Limited (NGX), said the exchange was targeting 30 million retail investors to transform market participation, deepen liquidity, and broaden investment across multiple asset classes.

Bringing more Nigerians into the market will require additional investment products and distribution channels. Digital platforms can provide access, while public offers can give people a reason to use them. The Dangote IPO is demonstrating how the two can work together.

Distribution, however, does not stop with investment applications. The offer is also available through point-of-sale (PoS) terminals, taking it into the neighbourhoods where Nigerians already withdraw cash, transfer money, pay bills, and operate businesses.

Nigeria’s PoS network has become one of the country’s largest financial-distribution systems. The country had 5.90 million active PoS terminals at the end of March 2025, creating a physical network that extends well beyond traditional bank branches.

Moniepoint, which has more than one million PoS terminals, said the IPO would be available through its agents across all 774 local government areas.

That network could help reach people who are not served by fintech applications. Nigeria’s 2.7 million retail investors would need to increase to 10 million for Dangote to meet its target. Spread across 5.9 million active PoS terminals, the gap would amount to an average of 1.24 additional people per terminal.

The IPO is therefore testing more than whether Nigerians want to own shares. It is testing the reach of fintechs’ digital and physical distribution networks and whether they can bring a substantially larger pool of Nigerians into the capital market.

The offer runs until October 13, and the subscription tally and allotment results that follow will provide the first concrete measure of how close the exercise came to the 10-million-investor target.

Participation in Nigeria’s biggest IPO could bring millions of people into the market for the first time. For fintechs, the opportunity extends beyond selling Dangote shares.

If Dangote comes close to his target of 10 million retail investors, the participating fintechs will have helped create millions of new relationships between Nigerians and the capital market. The refinery receives its capital, investors receive their shares, and fintechs gain customers and distribution infrastructure that could support future public offerings.

*Exchange rate used: ₦1,329.86/$