Following the closure of a $170 million Series C funding round, Flutterwave, a Nigerian FinTech startup, has recently announced a new collaboration with e-payment giant PayPal to allow customers worldwide the option of sending and receiving payments from African enterprises.
In past times, it has been impossible for African business to leverage on the payment structure of PayPal, which is rumored to be due to insufficient regulation and poor banking security — but that’s changing now thanks to a new feature on the platform called “Pay with PayPal.”
With this latest partnership, Flutterwave is allowing African businesses to connect with the 377 million existing accounts on PayPal’s global platform to help resolve the complex and broken banking infrastructure on the continent and eliminate the barrier of 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,” CEO Olugbenga “GB” Agboola 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.”
In a statement reported by Reuters, Flutterwave stated that its integration with PayPal will be operational across 50 African countries and worldwide.
Online payments systems have skyrocketed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, so the partnership between Flutterwave and PayPal is best fit in increasing access to online transactions, where many companies are making money from these days.
Flutterwave shared that it’s positioning the company model to be the premier African payment platform for multinationals entering new markets. Upon its recent $1 billion valuation, the startup told Reuters that its considering a New York listing following the additional $170 million it raised from investors.
Though there are still uncertainties around how this new partnership will impact the operations of both platforms moving forward, this is still a step in the right direction for Flutterwave’s future plans.
“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,” Agboola shared with TechCrunch. “PayPal’s global reach is unrivalled, and collaborating with them allows our customers to explore new markets where PayPal is embedded.”
