Flutterwave Teams With Alipay To Enable China-Africa Transactions

FinTech startup Flutterwave is teaming up with Alipay to offer digital payments between Alipay and African merchants.

Founded in Nigeria, Flutterwave is a a payments API that makes it easier for banks and businesses to process payments across Africa.

“We’ve managed to connect African countries…to each other, so it was about time we connected Africa to the world. We started with the U.S. … but you can’t connect Africa to the world without China,” the company said in a press release.

The integration with Alipay gives Flutterwave’s more than 60,000 merchants access to over 1 billion Alipay users. Flutterwave will earn revenue by charging its usual 2.8 percent on international transactions.

“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 told reporters. “There’s a lot of trade between Africa and China, and this integration makes it easier for African merchants to accept Chinese customer payments.”

The partnership is the result 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,’ ” Agboola explained.

Last year Flutterwave inked a deal with Flywire, a provider of global payment and receivables solutions for education, healthcare, and business to make it easier for banks and businesses to process payments across Africa.

“Nigeria can be a very complex foreign exchange environment,” Mike Massaro, CEO at Flywire, said at the time. “Together with Flutterwave, we’re removing a lot of that complexity and providing a more seamless payment experience for international students, patients, and businesses. Nigerians will now have the convenience of being able to make digital, cross-border payments in their local currency, through eBank transfers, credit/debit cards, and mobile payments. Our partnership will also streamline the reconciliation of these payments on the receiving end for schools, hospitals and businesses.”