Good News:- Paypal Expands Payment Services To Nigeria, 9 Other Countries

PayPal is entering 10 new countries this week, including
Nigeria, providing online payment alternatives for
consumers via mobile phones or PCs in markets often
blighted by financial fraud.
Rupert Keeley, the executive in charge of the EMEA
region of PayPal, the payments unit of eBay Inc, said in
an interview on Monday the expansion would bring the
number of countries it serves to 203.
Starting on Tuesday, 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 (phones), allowing us to expand into fast-
developing markets,” Keeley said.
Once the services go live, customers in the 10 countries
with access to the Web and a bank card authorised 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,” said Keeley, a
former regional banking executive with Standard
Chartered Plc and senior executive with payment card
company Visa Inc.
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, he said.
A 2013 survey of 200 UK ecommerce sites by Visa’s
CyberSource unit 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 result 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.
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.
Last week, 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.
PayPal has operated in 190 markets since 2007 and
added three countries – Egypt, Georgia and Serbia last
year. 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.