For those of you who are current with importation; you will understand the meaning and importance of Alipay, but for the sake of those who don’t know. Alipay is a digital wallet and payment platform own by the Jack Ma; the proud founder of the famous Alibaba and Aliexpress. That is not the news though; the news is that Alipay has partner with a Nigeria payment service – Flutterwave. This means that transaction between China and Nigeria will be smoother as payment is now easier.
It may also interest you to know that Alipay in 2013, Alipay surpassed PayPal in payments volume and currently claims a global network of more than 1 billion active users, from Alibaba’s latest earnings report.
Although, a large portion of Alipay’s network is in China, which makes the Flutterwave integration significant to capturing payments activity around the estimated $200 billion in China-Africa trade.
This is not only good for importers, bloggers or ecommerce people; it is also a good news for information creators; as we can now accept payment from our Chinese clients.
“There’s a lot of trade between Africa and China and this integration makes it easier for African merchants to accept Chinese customer payments.”
Mind you, Flutterwave will still earn revenue from the partnership by charging its standard 3.8% on international transactions with over 60,000 merchants on its platform.
In case you don’t know, existing Flutterwave customers include Uber, Facebook, Booking.com and e-commerce unicorn Jumia.com. Flutterwave has processed 100 million transactions worth $2.6 billion since inception, according to the company data.
It is also true that Flutterwave’s Alipay collaboration also tracks a trend of increased presence of Chinese companies in African tech.