PayPal, Flutterwave Forge Historic Partnership that will Allow African Businesses Receive Payments Globally

African payments company, Flutterwave, has collaborated with global payments giant, Paypal, to make it possible for PayPal customers all over the world to pay African merchants via its new ‘Pay with PayPal’ feature.

Flutterwave, which recently became a unicorn after netting a $170 million investment deal, announced the PayPal partnership via its official Twitter handle on Tuesday, March 16.

Pay with Paypal is now available on Flutterwave! 🦋😁

All Paypal users can now pay African businesses from anywhere in the world, on our gateway. We’re excited to be opening up a world of opportunities for businesses in Africa!

Find out more here: https://t.co/75hFiWUccQ pic.twitter.com/czL5YiMAp2

— Flutterwave (@theflutterwave) March 16, 2021

Explaining the collaboration, Flutterwave founder and CEO, Olugbenga ‘GB’ Agboola, said African merchants can now add PayPal as a payment option when receiving money outside the continent. He said the service would be available across 50 African countries and worldwide. However, the service is already available to those who have business accounts on Flutterwave.

“In a nutshell, we’re bringing more than 300 million PayPal users to African businesses so they can accept payments across the continent,” TechCrunch quoted GB as saying. “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.”

Agboola explained the importance of the partnership further in a Twitter thread:

Today, we are announcing an important step towards achieving our mission and goals. We @theflutterwave have collaborated with @PayPal to allow businesses in Africa receive payments from over 377 million @PayPal users all over the world. pic.twitter.com/h0tDPIOGwd

— GB 🦋 (@TechProd_Arch) March 16, 2021

In 2007, PayPal expanded to more to African countries but it restricted full access to its service. These countries were only allowed to receive payments on the platform while only 12 African nations were granted almost full access to PayPal features including to send, receive, and withdraw money.

Some of the selected African countries that had more access include Algeria, Botswana, Egypt, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Senegal, Seychelles, and South Africa.

In 2014, Paypal finally launched in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country and within a 12-month period, it became the company’s second-biggest market on the continent. But regardless of this feat, PayPal still restricted Nigerian merchants to only receiving money on its platform. It is believed that this was due to the country’s history of fraud.