Nigeria’s retail investors got a rude awakening on Monday, September 14, when the Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals IPO opened for subscription and immediately overwhelmed several of the country’s most popular investment platforms.
The offer, Africa’s largest IPO to date, is targeting up to 10 million retail investors and is seeking to raise N2.15 trillion through the sale of 4.1 billion shares priced at N525 each. With a minimum purchase requirement of just 10 shares, or N5,250, the entry point was low enough to draw in a wave of first-time investors, and that wave hit harder and faster than several platforms could handle.
Bamboo and Cowrywise bore the brunt
Bamboo, one of Nigeria’s leading investment apps and a major channel for retail equity trading on the exchange, began experiencing login failures within minutes of the offer going live at around 9:30 am. The company acknowledged the outage on social media, explaining that traffic volumes far exceeded what it had anticipated and that its team was working to restore access.
Cowrywise ran into the same problem around the same time, telling users it was seeing unusually high traffic and that its team was working to get the app back to normal. Reports also pointed to Afrinvest struggling under similar pressure, with users describing login errors, slow loading times, and accounts that simply would not open.
Bamboo reportedly recorded 40 per cent more account openings in the week leading up to the IPO than it saw in all of May, which had previously been its strongest month on record. That surge, arriving all at once on launch day, appears to have been more than the infrastructure could absorb.
Investors did not hold back their frustration
The disruptions triggered visible anger on social media, with affected users questioning why platforms that had known about the IPO date for weeks were not better prepared for the traffic. Some pointed out that the scale of interest should have been predictable given how widely the offer had been publicised, while others contrasted the fintech outages with the relative stability of bank-based channels, which also form part of the roughly 55 approved electronic channels through which Nigerians can subscribe to the offer.
Despite the frustration, the numbers were hard to ignore. Within about six hours of opening, the IPO had already drawn in an estimated N1.5 trillion in subscriptions, according to reports, underscoring just how much appetite there is among Nigerians to own a piece of Dangote’s refinery business.
What happens next
Both Bamboo and Cowrywise said they were actively working on fixes, and neither company gave a specific timeline for full restoration of service. With the subscription window still open until October 13, platforms that stumbled on day one have roughly a month to shore up their infrastructure before the deadline rush, which is likely to bring another spike in traffic as investors who missed the opening scramble to get in before the offer closes.
For now, the episode has become something of a stress test for Nigeria’s fintech investment apps, exposing how prepared, or unprepared, they were for a moment many of them had been anticipating for months.
