Flutterwave, Africa’s leading payments technology company, has on Tuesday announced a new collaboration with global payment leader, PayPal to enable customers of the latter globally to pay African merchants in the continent through Flutterwave’s platform.
The collaboration will be instrumental in supporting SMEs and freelancers to overcome the many challenges presented by the highly fragmented and complex payment and banking infrastructure, as well as connecting them with more than 377 million PayPal account holders globally.
It was nearly impossible for businesses in some African countries to receive money from PayPal. While the payments giant has not given reasons why this is so, speculation hints at factors like insufficient regulation and poor banking security in said countries.
However, that might be a thing of the past for some businesses with Flutterwave’s parternship with PayPal as African merchants can now receive payment through its ‘Pay with PayPal’ feature.
Speaking on the new deal, Olugbenga ‘GB’ Agboola, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Flutterwave, said;
We are excited to bring PayPal’s fully integrated services to businesses across Africa. The collaboration reinforces our vision of creating a seamless digital payments system for Africa’s business communities that can now transact with international consumers.
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.
He added;
Through our collaboration with PayPal, we are also bringing together two trusted global payment brands to provide millions of consumers and businesses a gateway to new opportunities.
Since inception, Flutterwave has processed over 140 million transactions worth over USD $9 billion worldwide and continues to expand its footprint to ensure consumers and merchants receive the best-in-class digital payment service.
The company only recently just attained unicorn status by being valued at over $1billion after raising $170 million in Series C funding stage.
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The new collaboration now expands its commitment to ensuring merchants have vast opportunities to deliver services and conveniently transact through its platform.
Nigeria’s e-commerce and that of the continent at large continues to grow at a breathtaking pace. In 2017, Africa generated $16.5 billion in revenue, and by 2022, it is expected to reach $29 billion. With numbers like this, it isn’t hard to see why PayPal wants to get in on the action, hence the partnership with Flutterwave.
The company, via its Application Programming Interface (APIs), offer payment services to individuals and businesses across the continent. Since launching in 2019, the African payments company has partnered with Visa to launch Barter; Alipay to offer digital payments between Africa and China; and Worldpay FIS for payments in Africa.
However, the collaboration with PayPal is arguably its biggest partnership yet. Now, African businesses have more access to sell to global customers using PayPal to receive and send payments online.
The service is now live and the integration with PayPal will be operational across 50 African countries and worldwide. For transactions, customers will need to sign up to Flutterwave to access PayPal to make, receive and withdraw payments.
