African merchants and its emerging spate of gig workers look set for a major impact on their services as Flutterwave partners with global payments giant, PayPal.
Per Techcrunch, Flutterwave is announcing a partnership with PayPal to allow African merchants to receive payments from PayPal users across the globe.
Flutterwave CEO, Olugbenga Agboola told Techcrunch that Flutterwave will integrate with PayPal so merchants and businesses can add PayPal as a payment option when receiving money from other continents.
Once effected, African businesses can connect to more than 377 million PayPal accounts.
Flutterwave says this service is already available for merchants with registered business accounts and will be operational across 50 African countries and around the globe. It also plans to roll out this service to individual merchants on the platform.
"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," says Agboola.
Besides businesses, Flutterwave allows payments for non-profits like churches, mosques, charity organisations, and event organisers to accept payments. It's also likely that the PayPal service will be available to them.
Before now, PayPal has only allowed just 12 African countries to send and receive, money on the platform. Others have had to find ways to circumvent this through other channels which could be cumbersome or way more expensive.
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According to the PayPal website, only Algeria, Botswana, Egypt, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Senegal, Seychelles and South Africa could send and receive money before this partnership.
Other countries like Nigeria could either only send but not receive or were completely restricted like Libya and Liberia.
Despite the restriction, in 2015, PayPal revealed that Nigeria became its second-largest market, behind South Africa which didn't have any restriction, just one year after it launched in Nigeria.
This move comes barely a week after Flutterwave announced its $170m Series C, which raised its valuation to over a billion dollars. PayPal was originally listed as one of the participating investors, but the company later claimed that this was untrue.
The company has also entered partnerships with the likes of Visa for the launch of its Barter service, Alipay for digital payments and WorldPay FIS for remittances.
It is also worthy of note that Visa and WorldPay invested in Flutterwave in 2020.
Considering Agboola's previous statements, we can expect to see more of such global partnerships in the future.
