Airtel Africa has finally settled on where it wants to take one of Africa’s biggest fintech businesses public. The bigger question is whether that market can still deliver what the company is looking for.
The telecom giant has confirmed London as the preferred listing venue for its mobile money business, saying the exchange offers one of the world’s deepest pools of institutional capital.
“We believe a London listing will provide access to a broad international investor base and support our ambition to unlock the long-term value of one of Africa’s leading fintech platforms,” Sunil Taldar, chief executive officer of Airtel Africa, said during thecompany’s earnings announcement on July, 23, 2026.
The company is reportedly seeking to raise between $1 billion and $2 billion at a $10 billion valuation. On paper, London should be capable of financing a deal of that size. It remains one of the world’s largest financial centres, with thousands of listed companies and trillions of dollars in market capitalisation.
Yet Airtel Money’s Initial Public Offering (IPO) arrives at a time when the London Stock Exchange is attempting to reverse years of subdued IPO activity. The exchange has spent years losing listings, liquidity, and prestige to rivals in New York, Asia and the Middle East. That raises a more difficult question than where Airtel Money will list: is London’s IPO market now too small for a billion-dollar African fintech offering, or has its recent decline been more about a shortage of companies than a shortage of capital?
London’s IPO numbers
On the surface, the numbers suggest Airtel faces an uphill battle. London’s IPO market has endured several years of decline. In the third quarter of 2025, it fell out of Bloomberg’s ranking of the world’s top 20 IPO markets, dropping to 23rd after being overtaken by exchanges in Mexico and Singapore.
The weakness has not simply been about the number of companies choosing London. It has been about the size of the deals.
Only 18 companies listed in London in 2024, raising a combined £777.7 million ($1.03 billion). Airtel Money is reportedly seeking as much as $2 billion, meaning its fundraising target alone could exceed the amount raised by every company that listed on the exchange throughout the previous year.
Activity improved in 2025, with 23 IPOs raising £2.1 billion ($2.79 billion), according to EY-Parthenon, a global strategy consulting organisation and part of the Ernst & Young (EY) global network. That represented a 170% increase from the previous year, but the recovery was less broad than the headline suggests. Eleven companies accounted for almost £1.9 billion ($2.53 billion) of the proceeds in the final quarter alone, meaning the rebound was driven by a handful of large transactions rather than a sustained return of IPO activity.
Even then, London struggled to produce truly blockbuster offerings.
Fermi Inc., a Texas-based company focused on developing electric grids, was thelargest IPO in London in 2025, raising$680 million at a valuation of almost $12.5 billion. Airtel Money is reportedly looking to raise at least $320 million more than Fermi while seeking a lower valuation, a reminder that investors would have to write one of London’s largest equity cheques in recent years if the IPO proceeds as planned.
The decline has also become visible in where companies are listing.
Wise, a UK fintech company, announced plans to move its primary listing to New York in July 2025; British pharmaceutical giantAstraZeneca said, in September 2025, that it intends to list its regular shares on the New York Stock Exchange. Bloomberg previously reported that Airtel Africa itself considered exchanges in the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere in Europe before settling on London.
Yet London may have offered advantages beyond fundraising. Airtel Africa is already listed there, many institutional investors already follow the company, and spinning off Airtel Money on the same exchange reduces the need to introduce an entirely new issuer to the market. Listing on another exchange, while potentially attracting higher fintech valuations, would also expose the company to more demanding disclosure requirements and a different investor base.
As companies leave, London’s share of European IPO fundraising has steadily eroded. In 2013, UK listings accounted for more than half of all European IPO proceeds. By the third quarter of 2025, that figure had fallen to just 3%
A capital or confidence problem?
Those figures paint a picture of an exchange that has become smaller, attracted fewer companies and lost ground to competing financial centres. But they do not necessarily prove London lacks the capacity to finance Airtel Money.
Annual IPO proceeds measure how much companies collectively raised in a given year. They do not measure how much capital investors have available to deploy.
London remains home to some of the world’s largest pension funds. UK pension funds have steadily reduced their exposure to domestic equities, with allocations falling from 53% in 1997 to just 4.1%, according to a November 2025 Reuters report.
For Airtel Money, the challenge is therefore not simply attracting investors to London, but convincing them that an African fintech deserves capital they are sitting on. Airtel Money’s business model is built on mobile money, merchant payments and digital financial services operating on top of Airtel Africa’s telecommunications network.
The platform now serves 56.5 million customers, processes more than $245 billion in annualised transaction value and generated $404 million in quarterly revenue, accounting for nearly 22% of Airtel Africa’s total revenue.
Those numbers help explain why Airtel Africa wants to separate the fintech business from the broader telecom group. The IPO is as much about valuation as it is about raising fresh capital.
If public market investors assign Airtel Money a valuation close to the reported $10 billion, Airtel Africa would unlock value that it believes is not reflected within its broader telecom business. If investors demand a substantial discount, the company could still complete the IPO while falling short of its larger objective.
Airtel’s second London test
Airtel Africa’s 2019 listing offers a reminder that fundraising and valuation are not always the same thing.
When the telecom operator listed in London in 2019, it raised $750 million at a valuation of $3.93 billion. The shares fell about 16% shortly after listing, making it one of Europe’s weakest large IPO debuts that year.
Today, Airtel Africa is worth £12.67 billion ($16.72 billion).
Mobile money has become one of the group’s fastest-growing businesses, and the sector is currently worth $1.4 trillion in Africa. Fintech now contributes a much larger share of revenue and profits than it did in 2019, while investors increasingly view digital financial services as a standalone growth business rather than merely an extension of telecommunications.
Whether London’s investors share that view will determine the success of Airtel Money’s IPO.
There are early signs that London’s fortunes may be improving. Seven companies listed on the exchange in the first half of 2026, raising £577 million ($767.4 million). Reforms to the UK’s listing rules are also expected to encourage more companies to go public over the coming year
Yet London remains a small player in an increasingly active global IPO market. Worldwide, 509 IPOs raised $193.6 billion in the first half of 2026. The United States alone accounted for $128 billion of those proceeds, while Greater China raised $42.3 billion.
For Airtel Africa, the IPO is ultimately a valuation exercise. For London, it is about credibility. If Airtel Money secures the valuation and fundraising it is seeking, the listing would suggest the exchange can still finance globally significant growth companies despite years of decline. If demand falls short, it will reinforce concerns about the City of London and whether the world’s biggest growth stories now need to look elsewhere for capital.
True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks.
Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
