Uber sold safer rides and better cars. Where the price is the product, that premium is hard to charge. Nigeria made it harder: fuel prices tripled after the 2023 subsidy removal, and Uber at times struggled to move its profits out of the country.
In a battle between the premium vs the price,
The price won.
“Rider affordability and driver economics are interconnected. A marketplace needs to work for both sides.”
Deepesh Thomas, Uber
The money coming in
Here is the odd part. While the platforms leave Nigeria, the banks are walking in.
On 9th October 2026, OPay filed to list in New York, and Standard Bank agreed to buy up to 4.99% of it, for no more than $200 million. JP Morgan is waiting on approval for a Nigerian merchant bank. Absa is weighing a license of its own.
OPay was founded by Chinese investors and is headquartered in Singapore, but Nigeria brings it 89.5% of its revenue. And what the banks are buying is no longer mainly payments. In the first half of 2026, OPay’s loans brought in $236.1 million, 50.6% of its revenue, up from 35% in 2024. It lent $927.6 million in Nigeria in those 6 months, about 3 times as much as a year earlier.
1 kind of business left: priced for the customer it hoped for.
The other is arriving: priced in naira, for the customer who is there.
The gap
The exits leave people behind.
At least 50,000 Nigerian drivers used Uber, according to their union. Many have not moved to another app, and the union’s leader says the paperwork stops them. In Abuja, a driver who switched to Bolt and inDrive after 6 years on Uber says his weekly income fell by about 33%. Moove’s 9,000 drivers now own their cars outright, with no fleet company behind them.
They need what Uber and Moove used to bundle: a car loan priced in naira, insurance, servicing, a way onto the next app. Nobody has sized that market. Everyone in it is a customer, and every one of them is already on the road.
Uber priced Lagos for the middle class it expected.
The next business in that traffic gets to price for the one that is actually there.
