[TechCrunch] Flutterwave and Alipay partner on payments between Africa and China

Flutterwave, a San Francisco and Lagos-based fintech startup providing a digital payments service and Flourish portfolio company, has partnered with Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba’s Alipay to offer digital payments between Africa and China. TechCrunch's Jake Bright shared a spotlight on the partnership's potential to impact merchants.

Alipay is Alibaba’s digital wallet and payments platform. In 2013, Alipay surpassed PayPal in payments volume and currently claims a global network of more than 1 billion active users, per Alibaba’s latest earnings report. 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 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 — aka GB — told TechCrunch. “There’s a lot of trade between Africa and China and this integration makes it easier for African merchants to accept Chinese customer payments.”

A Flutterwave company release added, “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.”

An Alipay spokesperson confirmed with TechCrunch the Flutterwave collaboration. Flutterwave will earn revenue from the partnership by charging its standard 3.8% on international transactions. The company currently has more than 60,000 merchants on its platform, according to Agboola.

Read the full article via TechCrunch here.