Flutterwave, PayPal partner to allow African businesses process payments

AFRICAN payments company, Flutterwave has partnered with United States payment giant, PayPal, to facilitate online payments among global customers via its platforms using a “Pay with PayPal” feature.

The company said in a statement on Tuesday, that the collaboration will connect small and medium enterprises with the more than 377 million PayPal account holders globally, eliminating the barrier to cross-border commerce.

“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,” CEO Olugbenga Agboola said.

Flutterwave’s integration with PayPal will be operational across 50 African countries and worldwide.

According to the statement, Flutterwave merchants in Kenya, South Africa, Egypt, Morocco, Mauritius, Malawi, Mozambique & Senegal are able to easily accept payments from PayPal users worldwide

The Covid-19 pandemic gave online payments a boost as more people rely on mobile apps, others for shopping and paying bills.

In the year 2020, PayPal‘s 377 million+ users made transactions that saw the American payment giant end the year with a $936 billion total payment volume.

Recall that the CEO and co-founder, Olugbenga Agboola, told Reuters last week that the company could consider a New York listing after Flutterwave had raised $170m from investors to push its valuation to over $1bn.

Flutterwave has also said it is positioning to be an African payment platform for multinationals entering new markets.

The fintech company, headquartered in San Francisco, has processed over 140 million transactions since 2019 after it was launched.