PayPal finally extends services to Nigeria, 9 other emerging markets

Online payments have picked up steam across the world, but certain countries, mostly due to lack of telecommunications infrastructure and the threat of fraud, have seen the rollout of such services slow to non-existent.

This week though, PayPal, one of the world’s leading internet payment companies, has officially opened up its services in Nigeria and nine other countries — markets that according to Reuters, are often fraught with fraud.

The full list of countries PayPal is expanding to offers up potentially 80-million new users for the payments giant. The full list includes:

• Nigeria
• Cameroon
• Ivory Coast
• Zimbabwe
• Belarus
• Macedonia
• Moldova
• Montenegro
• Monoco
• Paraguay

Nigeria’s 170-million plus population has an estimated 60-million internet users, making it the largest potential market for PayPal of all the countries it has entered this week.

Rupert Keeley, PayPal’s VP for the EMEA region, said that this brings the total number of countries that PayPal services to 203.

“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.

PayPal won’t launch all of its services in these new markets and initially customers will only have access to the “send money” feature to pay for goods at PayPal-approved international merchants. Local merchants will have to wait for this feature though. Another service not offered will be peer-to-peer transactions.

Up until now PayPal had avoided countries with high rates of internet-related fraud such as Nigeria, but now it seems the payments giant is ready to combat this through its secure system.

“We think we can give our sellers selling into this market a great deal of reassurance,” said Keeley.