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Optasia is planning to move into electricity advances and credit card-style lending, according to News24, extending a business built on lending people money to buy phone credit.
The company has spent more than a decade doing one thing. Optasia runs an artificial intelligence platform that lets mobile operators advance small sums to customers with no bank account and no credit file, most commonly airtime when they run out. It operates in 38 countries and reaches about 120 million customers a month.
Electricity is the obvious adjacent market. In places where households buy power on prepaid meters the same way they buy airtime, the lending logic transfers directly, and the meter becomes the distribution channel that the SIM card already is.
What complicates the story is who built that capability.
Bassim Haidar, who founded the company in 2012 when it was called Channel VAS, also founded Finergi, a utility finance business that fronts prepaid credit for electricity, gas and water in emerging markets. Both sit under BH Holdings, his personal group.
He has also been selling. Haidar held 19.3% of Optasia going into its flotation and now holds 1.5%, most of it disposed of through a single block. That is a reduction from a founding stake to almost nothing within months of listing, at a company that is not yet profitable.
A related-party transaction and a suspension in Nigeria have unsettled investors over the same period.
The Nigerian regulatory problem is the more serious of the two. Authorities there are moving to open the airtime credit lending market, which Optasia has dominated for years, and officials have argued that the dominance came at a cost to the economy. Nigeria is where the business started.
Haidar is 54 and was born in Nigeria to Lebanese parents. He founded his first company, Intercomm, at 20 in 1991, co-founded GMT Group in 1995 and built it into a leading procurement and logistics operation in West Africa, then started Channel IT in 2003 to service Nigeria's expanding mobile networks. Channel VAS followed in 2012.
His other ventures include SafriCanna, a South African medicinal cannabis producer with European manufacturing certification, and Knuru Capital. He bought a full-floor apartment at One Hyde Park in London for about £42 million.
Optasia is headquartered in Dubai and employs roughly 381 people.
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