Nigeria and Africa’s leading financial technology company Flutterwave have teamed up with US payments giant, Paypal to enable users anywhere in the world to make direct payment to African merchants. In 2017, Africa eCommerce value totalled $16.5 billion and it is expected to reach $29 billion by 2022. Flutterwave has exploited this economy area in Africa by offering flexible, quick and affordable payment services to individuals and businesses across the continent.
Founded in 1998, PayPal with its 377 million customers in more than 200 countries was one of the first fintech companies to create the internet’s infrastructure for cross-border payments and over $936 billion has been transacted on its platform. With close to three decades of its existence, it has been nearly impossible for businesses in some African countries to receive money from PayPal, although there was no special reason why this is so; factors like unstable regulation and poor banking security was said to be the speculated cause.
However, with the integration with Flutterwave, PayPal will be operational across 50 African countries and worldwide using the Flutterwave platform to make transactions. The service, for the time being, will be available for merchants with a registered business. Plans for individual merchants on the platform will be rolled out with time.
According to CEO Olugbenga 'GB' Agboola, "In a nutshell, we're bringing more than 300 million PayPal users to African businesses so they can accept payments across the continent. Our mission at the company has always been to simplify payments for endless possibilities, and from when we started, it has always been about global payments. So despite having the largest payment infrastructure in Africa, we want to have arguably all the important payments systems in the world on our platform. By working with PayPal, we can further strengthen our commitment to our customers and service users as we will be enabling them to transact and expand their business operations to reach new markets. PayPal's global reach is unrivalled, and collaborating with them allows our customers to explore new markets where PayPal is embedded".
