PayPal expands payment services to Nigeria, 9 others

 
Online payment firm, PayPal has said it has concluded plans to extend its services to ten new countries this week, including Nigeria, providing online payment alternatives for consumers via mobile phones or Personal Computers.

Rupert Keeley, the executive in charge of the Europe Middle East and Africa, EMEA region of PayPal, disclosed this in an interview yesterday.

PayPal had excluded Nigeria from access to its services citing fraud concerns. The expansion would bring the number of countries PayPal serves to 203.

Keeley said: “Starting on Tuesday, consumers in Nigeria, 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 phones, allowing us to expand into fast-developing markets.”

Once the services go live, customers in the ten 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.

Initially, PayPal is only offering “send money” services 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.

“We think we can give our sellers selling into this market a great deal of reassurance,” noted Keeley, adding that, “PayPal does not yet cover peer-to-peer transactions, which allow consumers to send money to other consumers. It has not yet enabled local merchants in the new markets to receive payments, nor is it offering other forms of banking services.”

A total of 80 million Internet users stand to gain access to PayPal global services this week, including those in five European markets – Belarus, Macedonia, Moldova, Monaco and Montenegro, four in the African nations of Nigeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, and Zimbabwe, as well as Paraguay. Internet usage figures are based on research by Euromonitor International.

PayPal counts 148 million active accounts worldwide.

This is coming just a week after MasterCard Inc, the world’s second-largest debit and credit card company, and a PayPal rival in payment processing, said it was working with the Nigerian government on a pilot to overlay payment technology on a new national identity card.