Flutterwave enables Chinese payments for African Merchants via Alipay

Flutterwave has partnered with Alipay to enable all its merchants access to over 1 billion Alipay users.

The San Francisco and Lagos-based fintech  startup has integrated the Alipay platform such that Flutterwave merchants can accept or install Alipay as a payment type to accept payments from its billion users. Flutterwave currently has more than 60,000 merchants on its platform.

Alipay is a third-party mobile and online payment platform, established in Hangzhou, China in February 2004 by Alibaba Group and its founder Jack Ma. As per its Alibaba’s latest earnings report, Alipay has more than 1 billion users worldwide, with 70% of them in China alone.

This initiative is significant as China-Africa bilateral trade has been steadily increasing for the past 16 years, relatively at over $200 billion annually.

According to Flutterwave in a company statement,  “We’ve set out to provide the complete payment solution for Africans to thrive in the global economy. The complete payment solution would first require interconnectivity within Africa, then connectivity from Africa to the world.

Currently, we’ve managed to connect African countries such as Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Rwanda, Ghana etc to each other, so it was about time we connected Africa to the world. We started with the U.S already but you can’t connect Africa to the world without China.”

According to Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga Agboola in a discussion with Techcrunch, the Flutterwave-Alipay alliance developed out of Agboola’s acceptance in Alibaba’s Africa eFounders Fellowship.

“Because of that I was in China to do meetings with Jack Ma and the only ask I had from that trip is ‘I want to be the Africa payment infrastructure that plugs directly into Alipay,’ said Agboola.

This new partnership is sure to boost Flutterwave transaction value way above over $1 billion (N365 billion) realised in 2018.

The Alipay partnership follows those between Flutterwave and Visa in January this year to launch a consumer payment product for Africa, called GetBarter.