The story
Bassim Haidar was born in Nigeria to Lebanese parents. According to the Founding MENA short, he watched his father lose the family fortune when he was 12 and set out to rebuild it. He started his first company, Intercomm, at 20 in 1991, co-founded the GMT group in 1995 and in 2003 founded Channel IT to serve Nigeria's growing mobile networks. He noticed that people across Africa who were out of phone credit would ring once and hang up so the other person would call back. Millions needed small amounts of credit but had no bank and no credit history. Haidar saw that top-up and call records could predict who would repay, and in 2012 he launched Channel VAS, which scored subscribers and advanced them airtime and later small cash loans, sharing revenue with operators who took no risk. The company became Optasia in 2022 and listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in November 2025, raising R6.5 billion.
