Airtel Africa confirms London for the Airtel Money listing, days before a $515 million deadline

Airtel Africa has named the London Stock Exchange as its preferred venue for listing Airtel Money, settling a question that has hung over the company for more than a year. The announcement came on Thursday 23 July 2026, inside the same statement that carried results for the quarter to 30 June. It commits the group to a listing in the second half of this year, subject to regulatory approvals. Chief executive Sunil Taldar said a London listing “will provide access to a broad international investor base.”

Airtel Money is the wallet that sits on an Airtel line, the thing you use to deposit cash with an agent, send money, pay a bill, buy airtime or move funds to and from a bank. In Kenya it competes with M-PESA. Across the 14 sub-Saharan African countries where Airtel operates, it has grown big enough that the group wants to sell it separately. It sits inside Airtel Africa, which is itself listed in London and Lagos, so an initial public offering would carve the wallet out and let investors buy it without buying the phone network underneath.

Why the venue was still an open question

The listing has been promised and postponed often enough that confirming a venue counts as progress. Airtel aimed to float the business by 2025, then targeted the first half of 2026, then in May pushed it back again, blaming market conditions after geopolitical developments and warning that higher energy costs would squeeze margins. We wrote about the results where that delay was announced and what the postponements were doing to the valuation. Where it would list was open too, since Airtel had been weighing an exchange in the United Arab Emirates against London.

The 31 July deadline

In 2021, Airtel Africa sold 22.1% of Airtel Mobile Commerce BV, the Dutch entity that holds Airtel Money, to four minority investors who put in roughly $550 million at a valuation of $2.65 billion. Two of them, TPG’s Rise Fund with 8.05% and Mastercard with 4.02%, negotiated put options. If the business had not listed within four years, they could require Airtel to buy their shares back at a fair value set by an independent bank. That clock ran out in July 2025, and Airtel announced on 1 August that both had agreed to defer it by another 12 months.

That deferred period ends on 31 July, four days from now. Airtel Africa’s 2026 annual report carries the potential liability at $515 million as at 31 March, down from $542 million a year earlier after dividends were paid to the option holders, a figure The EastAfrican reported in June. None of it is an automatic bill. It is a right the two investors may or may not use, and Airtel has drawn no connection between that date and its London announcement.

What Airtel still has not published

Airtel has given no valuation, no offer size, no indication of what percentage will be sold, nothing on whether the shares are newly issued or sold by existing holders, and no date.

The Financial Times has reported that Citi is leading work on a deal that could value Airtel Money at around $10 billion, or roughly GBP 7.5 billion, which would make it London’s largest new flotation since Wise in 2021. Citi, Airtel Africa and Airtel Money all declined to comment to the paper. Outlets citing the FT, The Kenyan Wallstreet among them, put the amount to be raised at about $1.5 billion. Bloomberg reported a wider range of $7 billion to $10 billion earlier in the year. Airtel has confirmed none of it.

In Kenyan terms, $10 billion is roughly KES 1.29 trillion, against a market value for the whole of Safaricom of around KES 1.4 trillion. If the reported figure is close, the wallet alone would be worth nearly as much as Safaricom.

The numbers Airtel did publish

From the results for the quarter to 30 June 2026:

• Airtel Money customers: 56.5 million, up 23.3% in a year
• Mobile money revenue: $404 million, about KES 52 billion, up 38.9% in reported currency and 25.8% in constant currency
• Value moved through the platform in the quarter: $61.4 billion, about KES 7.9 trillion
• Annualised total processed value: above $245 billion, about KES 31.6 trillion, up 51.5%
• Value moved per customer per month: $371, about KES 47,900, up 13.0%

The two growth rates differ because reported currency includes African currencies strengthening against the dollar, while constant currency strips that out, so 25.8% describes how much the business grew rather than how the exchange rate moved. Annualised total processed value takes the quarter’s $61.4 billion out to a full year, and counts money passing through the system, not money Airtel keeps.

Across the group there were 189 million customers, 87.3 million of them on data, with smartphone penetration up to 51.0% from 45.8%, revenue of $1.85 billion and profit after tax of $198 million against $156 million a year earlier. Airtel puts mobile money at 21.8% of group revenue, but that sets the wallet’s gross revenue against group revenue after internal charges are stripped out. Remove those charges from both sides and the wallet brought in $334 million, or 18% of the group.

What it means in Kenya

Airtel Money Kenya was carved out of Airtel Networks Kenya as a separately licensed company in 2022, so the Central Bank of Kenya could supervise it directly. When Airtel sold the first stake in AMC BV in 2021, it described that entity as intended to hold the mobile money businesses across all fourteen markets, and The EastAfrican has since reported that it does, with the Nigerian payment service bank the exception. On that reading Kenyan wallets sit inside the company being listed, though Airtel has published no breakdown of the perimeter.

Kenya matters to the pitch because it is where Airtel has come closest to breaking a monopoly. In the Communications Authority’s report for January to March 2026, Safaricom held 89.1% of mobile money subscriptions, leaving 10.9% that is effectively all Airtel Money since Telkom’s T-Kash rounds to nothing. When the regulator first published that split, for the quarter to September 2022, it was 96.8% against 3.1%. Getting from there to here took price, in the form of free Airtel-to-Airtel transfers, and cash access, which Airtel bought by opening bank agent networks to its customers, including 22,000 KCB agents in June. Some of that price advantage has gone since we found Airtel quietly raising its fees for sending to M-PESA to match Safaricom’s rates earlier this month.

How big Kenya is inside the listing is unknown, because Airtel does not break the country out. East Africa produced $297 million of the $404 million in mobile money revenue, and that region also takes in Malawi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

What to watch

The prospectus ends the guessing. It has to name the offer size, the stake and the price range. It should also set out what Airtel Money pays the telco for airtime distribution, agent networks and network access, which is the thing that will decide how profitable the wallet looks on its own. Until the prospectus publishes, $10 billion is press reporting rather than company disclosure.

Before that comes 31 July, when the put options become exercisable. After it comes the Communications Authority’s next quarterly report, covering April to June 2026 and due around September on the regulator’s recent pattern. That will be the first reading of whether last month’s fee increase cost Airtel any of its 10.9%. Airtel Money Kenya goes into all of this without a managing director, after Anne Kinuthia-Otieno left on 25 July.