Is PayPal now in Nigeria? - What you MUST Know! - YouTube

Is PayPal really now in Nigeria guys?

Let’s find out!

On the 15th of March 2021, Flutterwave announced that they have partnered with PayPal.

It garnered massive reactions from a lot of people, they were the number 1 trend on Twitter,

so many blogs and articles sprung up about them and everyone had their hopes up and many

people were asking questions so in this video I’ll be answering most of the questions.

We’re talking about one of the biggest payment platforms in the world that has over 377 million

accounts globally, are they now letting Nigeria receive payments after like 14 years of blocking

us?

For sure this Flutterwave partnership means that they are letting many Africans receive

payments . This could be a huge huge deal and I’ll explain why in a bit.

If you’re interested in mobile technology & financial analysis, general personal finance

tips.

Do consider giving this video a like so that more people like you can see this and know

what it’s about and without further ado, welcome to episode 3 of Finance Friday.

PayPal’s Brief History with Nigeria & Africa

In 2007, PayPal announced that it would be expanding to more African countries, it listed

a huge number of African countries but 3 countries were prominently missing in this.

Nigeria, Ghana and Egypt.

According to a World Bank blog, While many countries were under the Send.

Receive .Withdraw Slogan.

No African country either Individual Accounts and Businesses had that opportunity and in

fact, we could only send.

When people asked PayPal for a direct reason why we couldn’t receive money.

The official response was mostly the same: Due to the Complexities of Global expansion.

However analysts believe it could be because of the banking system in some African countries,

the government trying to control foreign exchange which I’ve talked about on this channel

multiple times and of course internet fraud.

For the African people, there was massive sentiment then that they could only take our

money but we can’t receive anything.

In fact, there was a petition that was raised that PayPal should allow Nigerians have accounts

to pay for stuff and receive payments.

Nigeria is a huge market and being shunned like that was sort of difficult for most people.

Since then they actually listened and opened up the service a bit.

In fact in 2014, they tried to allow inflows very briefly but Merchants were not included.

Since then we’ve seen services like Xoom come up to help but nothing was really the

same.

Even Flutterwave which we’ll be dissecting later in this video tried it with their Rave

platform in 2017 but it fell flat.

14 years later, the case for the most part was still the same.

Nigerians and many Africans both individuals and businesses residing inside the continent

could not receive or even withdraw money either to a bank or credit card.

It was only South Africa and Kenya I believe that had many accessible features of PayPal

where they could in fact receive and withdraw cash into their bank account.

Some other African countries needed a Visa card or US bank account to withdraw like Egypt

and Algeria and about 5 others.

All of that happened and some of it still do, Until now.

Is PayPal now really in Nigeria?

Now guys, this section of the video might not be what you hoped for but just stick to

the end for my experiment that was quite interesting.

So can Nigerians now receive money from PayPal.

I don’t want to sound like the YouTube guy that tells you to stick around for long but

trust me on this.

Okay, we’ve had a really awkward start to the year 2021 where we had the Central Bank

Effectively banning Cryptocurrency.

The Central Bank went further to create a Naira 4 Dollar scheme where for every one

dollar you receive as a Nigerian, you get 5 Naira and I explained it in detail why the

CBN is doing this in my previous Finance Friday video.

I explain the implications and what it really means so you can watch that after you’re

done with this one it’s also very insightful, I’ll leave a link below so you can watch

but the rules don’t really apply here.

You see, payPal in the US, UK, Canada and many developed countries have access to PayPal’s

full services.

Just go to the countries page of PayPal and when you click on Nigeria scroll down the

page all you see is that you can only send money, you can’t receive and when you scroll

down on the US, there’s almost nothing you can’t do with PayPal, you can even buy Cryptocurrency,

something that the Nigerian government has effectively banned.

Now, March 15th 2021, Flutterwave makes a huge announcement that they have partnered

with PayPal to enable Africa receive payments from their over 377 million customers.

PayPal in 2020 had a huge 936 billion dollar payment volume which is practically nearing

a trillion dollars.

Africa was excluded and that’s what Flutterwave was trying to solve.

In this same article, the fine print reads that “Flutterwave merchants in Kenya, South

Africa, Egypt, Morocco, Mauritius, Malawi, Mozambique & Senegal are able to easily accept

payments from PayPal users worldwide” You see how this doesn’t include Nigeria.

Bummer, but this video is not over yet.

It just didn’t make sense to me that Nigeria wasn’t included.

So I did what any normal human being would do, I created a Flutterwave Merchant Store

on the platform and tried to pay with PayPal to my Nigerian Merchant account, did it work?

here’s what happened

Testing PayPal Payment to Nigeria

I may or may not have lost some money so please hit that like button for what I’m about

to show you.

I went into the dashboard, I confirmed PayPal as a payment method for the company I created,

and I created this Payment Link.

So think of me as the Nigerian Business trying to receive money in USD or dollar from PayPal.

So once I created my product payment link, I now made a payment.

I paid for a “YouTube Page” to myself that cost $2 by myself for myself.

You get the idea.

Anyway after payment via PayPal, I got a receipt as the payer from both Flutterwave and PayPal.

Then as the merchant.

I got a “New Successful Transaction” email that I have received $2.

Now, when I open up PayPal, I see that I have a notification of a $2 transaction collected

for me or my company in this case by Flutterwave.

Keep in mind that It doesn’t show in my Payments received section on PayPal as you

can see here because I’m not allowed to receive money via PayPal right? but it shows

in Transaction Summary or my Recent Activity tab.

Now, further dissecting this transaction, it shows in the Payment status as Completed,

it also shows that the Payment was “Sent to Flutterwave or FLW Commerce” so this

simply means that, and as you already know, PayPal is only a middle Man or payment method

to move money from a PayPal customer, through PayPal to you here in Africa on Flutterwave.

So Nigerians cannot receive money via PayPal but Flutterwave merchants that are in Africa

can receive dollars via their Flutterwave store.

Wink.

What this means is that now.

Further down, we can see that the contact information is Flutterwave.com/ke or Kenya

which is an African country.

This is complete with the email address and the kind of debit card that the customer that

paid me used, in this case me.

However, on getting to the Flutterwave dashboard here, I see that I have nothing showing up

in my transactions for a while but about 15 minutes later, I see a transaction that looks

like this.

When I click the transaction, I can see the ID, transaction fees.

Customer Information, I can see the device fingerprint of the customer and their IP address

and can even go as far as Blacklisting a customer, and on the right side, I can see the timestamps

or what exactly the customer was doing and how the transaction was making progress in

a second by second or minute by minute interval until the transaction was completed which

is dope.

When I went to my Balance section, I saw how much is left in my holding balance which is

the amount after fees from PayPal.

It’s not moved to my available balance yet which means I can’t spend or withdraw it

just yet.

As a freelancer though or e-commerce person that you are, you’ll only need to add your

Flutterwave link to payment method.

They will simply click on Pay via PayPal and you have your cash right into your Flutterwave

account.

As a Flutterwave merchant now, the PayPal transaction fees of 4.4% of the transaction

value + $0.30 per transaction apply to you.

However, that doesn’t fully check out because I was only charged 4.4% transaction fee getting

1.9 dollars and was not charged the 30 cents.

That would mean I’ll have 1.6 dollars left but then again, this payment is still held

in my holding balance and has not moved to my available balance yet at the time of making

this video.

I don’t know if it will but follow me on twitter and I’ll have updates for you on

everything involved.

This is an experiment and I wouldn’t expect you to try this out just yet and as I said

I’ll have more updates.

Conclusion

However, if this goes through, it will open up African businesses to the world.

I for one who has designed as a freelance graphic designer have struggled with receiving

payments for the longest time.

Many payers don’t like using Payoneer themselves even though it was the next best alternative.

This might also be limited to businesses, I registered as a business and this might

not be available for individuals but it’s worth looking into because now, all you’ll

need to do is just generate a link.

I made a video about my streams of income and tips everyone should know about starting

and running a business online to earn money about $500 a day, you can watch that with

the link below that like button for free, and in that video I also touch on why it can

be beneficial to create and register a business especially in Nigeria.

Many analysts see this PayPal and Flutterwave partnership as a major stepping stone for

Africa, especially African Businesses and one way for PayPal to minimize the “Complexities

of Global Expansion” as they stated.

Flutterwave is already a business leader in this regard, they are currently valued at

1 billion dollars, making them the first Nigerian Unicorn after they recently raised a 170 million

dollars for expansion.

Flutterwave has also raised 35 million dollars in the recent past in 2020 for their Series

B as well as $10 million in the Series A in 2018.

They have over 290,000 merchants, Launched their new mobile app for Flutterwave and they

also own Barter which I’ve talked about in my previous video to make dollar payments

from Nigeria.

Since inception or since they started operations, they’ve carried out over 140 million transactions

worth $9 billion worldwide and they especially cater to ecommerce.

According to Analysts, ecommerce is expected to reach $29 billion by 2022 in Africa alone

and it would be quite bad for PayPal to miss out on this.

What are your thoughts about this guys, do you think this is the right move at this time?

Is PayPal is going to eventually enter Nigeria fully after a while with Flutterwave?

Or if you’re from countries like Kenya, and the aforementioned that they have direct

partnerships with, have you tried using PayPal or Flutterwave as a merchant.

Let me know in the comments below.

If this video was useful for you please drop a like and hit subscribe and the bell icon

beside it so you’ll be the first to know when I post a new video.

Thanks for watching and I’ll talk to you in the very next video.