PayPal Extends Service To Nigeria and 9 Other Countries
PayPal in Nigeria and 9 other countries.
PayPal has officially extended its online payment service to Nigeria and 9 other countries in Europe and Africa. PayPal is an online payment platform owned by eBay Inc and has been dubbed the most secure payment platform in the world. PayPal allows any business or consumer with an email address to securely, conveniently, and cost-effectively send and receive payments online. PayPal provides online payment alternatives for businesses and consumers via PCs or mobile phones. The online platform is used by many governments including the American government because of its reliability and safety.
In an interview with Rubert Keely, the executive in charge of the EMEA region of PayPal, he confirmed the new development saying the company is on an expansion mission bringing the number of countries it serves to 203.
Keely said, starting on Tuesday 17/6/2014, consumers in Nigeria, which has 60 million users and has Africa’s largest population, along with nine other markets in sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America will be able to make payments through PayPal.
PayPal has been going through a period of reinvention, refreshing many of its services to make them easier to use on mobile, allowing us to expand into fast-developing markets, Keeley said.
Starting from today, customers in Nigeria and the other 9 countries with access to the Web and a bank card authorized for Internet transactions will be able to register for a PayPal account and make payments to millions of sites worldwide.
PayPal is starting these countries with a “send money” service for consumers to pay for goods and services at PayPal-enabled merchant sites while safeguarding their financial details. This is free to consumers and covered by fees it charges merchants.
Keeley who was a former regional banking executive with Standard Chartered Plc and senior executive with payment card company Visa Inc said “We think we can give our sellers selling into this market a great deal of reassurance”.
PayPal has not yet enabled the consumers in the new market to do peer-to-peer transactions, which allow consumers to send money to other consumers. Meaning, that merchants in the new market cannot receive payments nor transact any other forms of banking services.
A survey conducted by Visa’s CyberSource unit in 2013 estimated that 1.26 percent of online orders are fraudulent and that 85 percent of merchants expected fraud to increase or remain static last year.
CyberSource also estimated that suspicion of fraudulent transactions results in 8.2 percent of online orders in Latin America being rejected by merchants, compared with 5.5 percent in Europe and 2.7 percent in the United States and Canada.
Such fraud can include ID theft, social engineering, phishing, and automated harvesting of customer financial data via botnets, or networks of computers controlled by hackers.
The ten (10) countries that will be accessing the online platform service alongside Nigeria include Belarus, Macedonia, Moldova, Monaco, and Montenegro from Europe, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, and Zimbabwe from Africa as well as Paraguay from South America.
Euromonitor International (A global information publisher providing market research reports, statistics, and online information systems on industries, countries, and consumers) estimated that a total of 80 million Internet users stand to gain access to PayPal global services this week.
READ: How to Open and Verify PayPal Account in Nigeria With Your ATM Card
PayPal has 148 million active accounts worldwide and the number keeps increasing.
PayPal before now operates in 190 countries since 2007. It added Egypt, Georgia and Serbia last year making it 193. Roughly a quarter of the $52 billion in payment volumes PayPal reported in the first quarter of 2014 were for cross-border transactions. PayPal reported $1.8 billion in revenue during the period.
This is great news among entrepreneurs and merchants in the listed countries especially Nigeria who have been limited to a lot of business due to the blacklisting by PayPal. PayPal in Nigeria will boost the country’s economy as opportunities will be opened for a lot of entrepreneurs in the country.
Hopefully, in the near future, the peer-to-peer transaction service will be enabled by PayPal allowing Nigerian merchants to receive money for goods in their e-Store and websites/blogs using the platform. Allowing PayPal in Nigeria will be a big boost to the company’s revenue. I bet PayPal will make a lot of commission from the volume of transactions that will be emanating from this part of the world.
Businesses like MTN Nigeria over-took its parent company MTN South Africa in revenue in just 3 years of its existence in the country thanks to the population of the country. I think PayPal will be singing the same song in a near future.
Major online platforms similar to PayPal in Nigeria include but are not limited to;
- OnlineNaira
- Paga
- SimplePay
- FasteCash.com
- VirtualTerminalNetwork.com
