Flutterwave, the African payment firm has announced it is partnering with PayPal to allow PayPal customers globally to pay African merchants through its ‘Pay with PayPal’ feature.
The partnership between the two payment giants would connect the more than 377 million PayPal accounts globally.
Speaking to Techcrunch on the partnership, the CEO of Flutterwave Olugbenga ‘GB’ Agboola, said this 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, the company claims. Flutterwave hopes to roll out this service to individual merchants on the platform as well.
“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.”
This partnership will come as good news to many African merchants especially in Africa’s biggest country-Nigeria because it means that they can now make and receive payment for services seamlessly. Regardless, there is still the nutty issue of individuals being unable to receive payment in many African countries including Nigeria due to the prevalence of internet fraud.
Interestingly, only 12 African countries can send and receive PayPal money but to varying degrees. They include Algeria, Botswana, Egypt, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Senegal, Seychelles, and South Africa.
Before this partnership, Flutterwave had recently announced a $170,000,000 Series C funding which took its valuation to $1 billion.
