PayPal Holdings Inc., the leading American digital payments enterprise operating a global online payments system, has reportedly teamed up with African payments firm, Flutterwave, to bring Africa into its comprehensive global payments ecosystem.
For the uninitiated, earlier it was almost impossible for businesses across some African nations to receive payments through PayPal. While the exact reason behind this shortcoming is still unknown, speculation points at factors such as insufficient regulation as well as poor banking security across these countries.
Now, with the Flutterwave-PayPal collaboration, this obstacle is looking up to be a thing of past for several businesses, as it would enable PayPal customers across the globe to make payments to African merchants using the platform’s ‘Pay with PayPal’ feature.
Through this partnership, African businesses would be able to connect with over 377 million PayPal accounts throughout the globe. This would effectively help them overcome the challenges posed by the highly fragmented as well as complicated nature of Africa’s banking and payment infrastructure.
As per Flutterwave CEO, Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, Flutterwave would integrate with PayPal to allow merchants to add PayPal as a new payment option when they are to receive payments from outside the continent.
This service, which is currently already available for regional merchants that have a registered Flutterwave business accounts, would be operational throughout 50 African nations and worldwide. Flutterwave also expects to launch this service to solo merchants on its platform as well.
The supposed Flutterwave collaboration was recently confirmed by a PayPal spokesperson. Since PayPal’s expansion in Africa, the company has maintained a relationship that is pretty one-sided with a majority of nations on the continent.
This relationship effectively only allowed them to send money. In fact, as per its website, just 12 African nations have the ability to both send as well as receive payments on the platform, based on varying degrees.
These 12 nations include Botswana, Algeria, Kenya, Egypt, Malawi, Lesotho, Morocco, Mauritius, Senegal, Mozambique, South Africa, and Seychelles.
Source credit: https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/15/flutterwave-and-paypal-partner-to-allow-african-merchants-to-accept-and-make-payments/