Airtel Africa has finally picked a venue for one of the biggest fintech listings to come out of the continent this year. The telecom group wants to take its mobile money business, Airtel Money, public on the London Stock Exchange. It’s targeting a raise of between $1 billion and $2 billion at a valuation of roughly $10 billion. The question now is whether London can still pull off a deal that size.
Airtel Africa CEO Sunil Taldar confirmed London as the preferred listing venue on July 23, 2026, during the company’s earnings announcement. He described the exchange as one of the world’s deepest pools of institutional capital. That reasoning makes sense on paper. London is still one of the largest financial centres on earth, home to thousands of listed companies and trillions of dollars in market capitalisation.
However, the exchange has also spent the last several years shrinking. London dropped out of Bloomberg’s ranking of the world’s top 20 IPO markets in the third quarter of 2025. It fell to 23rd place after Mexico and Singapore overtook it. Only 18 companies listed on the exchange in 2024, raising a combined $1.03 billion. That means Airtel Money’s fundraising target alone could exceed everything London’s IPO market produced the entire previous year.
Activity did pick up in 2025. Twenty three IPOs raised $2.79 billion, according to EY-Parthenon. But most of that recovery came from a small cluster of large deals, not a broad return of listings. Even London’s biggest offering last year, the Texas-based grid developer Fermi Inc, raised just $680 million at a $12.5 billion valuation. So Airtel Money is aiming to raise well over $300 million more, while seeking a lower valuation than that deal achieved.
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The exodus from London has been just as telling as the decline in new listings. UK fintech company Wise announced plans to shift its primary listing to New York in mid 2025. Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca said in September that year that it also intends to list its ordinary shares in New York. Bloomberg has reported that Airtel Africa itself weighed exchanges in the UAE and elsewhere in Europe before settling on London. Britain’s share of European IPO fundraising has fallen from more than half in 2013 to just 3 percent by late 2025.
Still, those figures only measure how much money companies raised in a given year. They don’t measure how much capital investors actually have sitting on the sidelines. London remains home to some of the world’s largest pension funds. Even though those funds have sharply cut their exposure to domestic equities, from 53 percent of holdings in 1997 down to about 4 percent today, according to Reuters. So for Airtel Money, the real test isn’t whether London has money. It’s whether investors are willing to back an African fintech business at the valuation the company wants.
There’s still reason to think London made sense despite the risk. Airtel Africa is already listed there, giving Airtel Money a built in base of institutional investors who already track the parent company. Spinning off the mobile money arm on the same exchange also avoids the cost of introducing an entirely new issuer elsewhere, even if other markets might have offered richer fintech valuations.
Airtel Africa has been here before, too. When the telecom operator first listed in London in 2019, it raised $750 million at a $3.93 billion valuation. The stock fell about 16 percent shortly after, making it one of the weakest large IPO debuts in Europe that year. Today the company is worth roughly $16.7 billion, and mobile money has grown into one of its strongest earners. Airtel Money now serves more than 56 million customers and processes upward of $245 billion in annualised transaction value. It generates about $404 million a quarter, close to 22 percent of Airtel Africa’s total revenue. Africa’s mobile money sector as a whole is now valued at around $1.4 trillion.
There are also faint signs that London’s fortunes are turning. Seven companies listed in the first half of 2026, raising roughly $767 million. Reform to the UK’s listing rules is also expected to draw more companies to the market over the coming year. Even so, London remains a small player globally. Worldwide IPOs raised $193.6 billion in the first half of 2026 alone, with the US accounting for $128 billion of that and Greater China raising $42.3 billion.
For Airtel Africa, this listing is ultimately about proving what the fintech arm is worth on its own. For London, it’s about proving the exchange can still finance a business of this size at all. If Airtel Money lands close to its $10 billion target, it becomes rare proof that London hasn’t lost its ability to fund the world’s growth companies. If it falls short, it adds to a growing case that the biggest fintech stories may need to look past the City for capital.
