Fintech company Flutterwave has teamed up with U.S. payments giant PayPal to enable the latter’s customers pay African merchants through its platform, the Africa-focused payments firm said on Tuesday.
The collaboration will connect small and medium enterprises with the more than 377 million PayPal account holders globally, Flutterwave said, eliminating the barrier to cross-border commerce.
According to CEO Olugbenga ‘GB’ Agboola, the collaboration will happen via a Flutterwave integration with PayPal so merchants can add PayPal as a payment option when receiving money outside the continent.
The service, which is already available for merchants with registered business accounts on Flutterwave, will be operational across 50 African countries and worldwide, according to a company release. A representative of PayPal has also confirmed this deal.
Online payments got a boost with the COVID-19 pandemic as people rely on mobile apps for shopping and paying bills, and as such the integration with Flutterwave and PayPal is set to be a major highlight in online payment transactions.
Like other companies in the digital payments sector, PayPal has profited from the boom in online transactions that pushed more business into the virtual realm.
Flutterwave has said it is positioning to be an African payment platform for multinationals entering new markets. Founded in 2016 by Nigerians and headquartered in San Francisco, the firm has processed over 140 million transactions.
The CEO of Flutterwave, said (in an interview with TechCrunch), that:
“In a nutshell, we’re bringing more than 300 million PayPal users to African businesses so they can accept payments across the continent,” he said to TechCrunch. “
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.”
Background To The Flutterwave Integration
Since PayPal’s expansion to Africa, only 12 African countries can send and receive money on the platform, but to varying degrees. These countries include Algeria, Botswana, Egypt, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Senegal, Seychelles and South Africa.
This made it a problem for merchants operating from countries not included in Paypal’s “range”, particularly at the heart of Africa, in Nigeria. PayPal finally arrived Nigeria in 2014 and went on to become the company’s second-biggest market on the continent.
The issue of online financial fraud however, stifled the operations of PayPal in Nigeria, therefore leading the country to take stringent action on its operations in order to avoid liability. But in recent times, e-commerce in Nigeria, and Africa at large has yielded billions of dollars and is projected to continue to peak at exponential levels.
It is for this reason, that PayPal has decided to make the partnership with Flutterwave. This new integration arrangement between both companies, has solidified Flutterwave’s position in the view of multinationals planning to venture into the African commercial space.
By Oluwamayowa Akinyemi
Oluwamayowa Akinyemi is a digital and web content developer with experience in web content development and management as well as research and writing. He is an avid reader of random subject matters and a sucker for movies and video games. He is also passionate about youth empowerment and is a global affairs analyst and enthusiast.
