Flutterwave Partners Alipay to Provide African Merchants Access to Over 1 Billion Customers

Nigerian payments infrastructure company, Flutterwave has partnered with Alipay, the payments arm of e-commerce platform Alibaba, to connect African businesses with China. The partnership allows Flutterwave handle payments between companies/businesses in Africa and the over 1 billion Alipay users abroad.

This is a huge deal for Nigerian/African businesses as there is a big trade relationship between Africa and China which is worth about $200 billion.

“This means that all our merchants can accept or install Alipay as a payment type to accept payments from its billion users,” Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga Agboola — aka GB — told TechCrunch.

Flutterwave and Alipay partner on payments between Africa and China https://t.co/0j9qroyzBb

— Osaretin Victor Asemota (@asemota) July 29, 2019

With over 1 billion global active users, AliPay is a payment giant, surpassing Paypal in payments volume. This is thanks to its stronghold in China, the world’s most populous country with about 1.4 billion.

And now with this partnership, Flutterwave will henceforth handle all AliPay payments between the digital wallet and merchants across Africa. This will make it a lot easier for African merchants to accept Chinese customer payments.

Payments is partnerships and we’re happy to announce that we have partnered with @Alipay to create even more avenues for our merchants to seamlessly receive payments from customers all over the world 🌍.

Read more on our partnership here 🦋#WaverSZN: https://t.co/VyCZs8TaCy

— Flutterwave (@theflutterwave) July 29, 2019

“This means that all our merchants can accept or install Alipay as a payment type to accept payments from its billion users.”

Olugbenga Agboola, CEO, Flutterwave.

Techcrunch reports that the Flutterwave-Alipay alliance developed out of Agboola’s acceptance in Alibaba’s Africa eFounders Fellowship.

Flutterwave continues global expansion

With its eyes set on connecting African business with the world, this is the latest stride by the company. And it follows a partnership between Flutterwave and Visa earlier this year that launched a payment product for Africa, called GetBarter.

In addition to providing African merchants an easy link to trade with China counterparts, the partnership also offers Flutterwave access to more African countries.

Currently operating in countries like Nigeria, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Ghana, and now United Kingdom and Zambia, the new partnership could also see it expand its services into other Africa countries where there’s a need for this solution. This will see it increase the number of merchants on its platform, which is currently 60,000 and in turn process more in 2019.