Paypal Nigeria is officially born

Paypal Nigeria is live and this is already getting a lot of people excited. Paypal recently announced in their blog that they were expanding to Nigeria along with some other countries of the world like Belarus, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Macedonia, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Paraguay and Zimbabwe. This adds about 3 more African countries to the list of 46 African countries where Paypal is already present.

I was also excited when I read the post since not having a Paypal account in can really limit one to many cool websites around the world. For instance, having a Paypal account would allow me to buy domain names and pay for web hosting on certain websites. A Paypal account will also allow me to buy digital content like e-books on certain websites like Clickbank. With a Paypal account I would also be able to send money to someone else in the world and also be able to receive payment of money from other Paypal users. However, it seems that for the latter, Paypal Nigeria does not allow users to receive money just yet. I guess they did it to prevent scammers or just being cautious.

Anyway, Paypal just seemed to have opened up their business in Nigeria so as to be able to earn more profits now that Nigerians were spending money online and given the rapid growth of Nigeria's economy. For several years already, payment processors like Mastercard and Visa International have take root in Nigeria and now allow users to make payments globally.

With Paypal Nigeria coming to town, it happens that the competition among online payment platforms would only get heated up with Visa and Mastercard already domination that niche. Most bank accounts in Nigeria have already being linked with Visa and Mastercard and it might be hard for Paypal to get direct access to such bank accounts. Perhaps, they might partner with banks one by one if they offer a better deal than the existing payment processors.

For now, Paypal Nigeria doesn't offer users the ability to link their bank accounts but just their credit or debit cards which are already linked to their accounts. A Paypal user in Nigeria can get his account verified by linking a debit/credit card to it and this must be a globally acceptable one like Visa or Mastercard and not other local processors like Verve.

Paypal Nigeria was officially launched on the 17th of June 2014 and by the end of the day, many Nigerians who had already heard the news and had been eager to own an official Paypal account tried registering although there were some hiccups. Some who arrived Paypal's site much earlier were not able to register since the Nigerian version of the site was not live yet and Nigeria was not included in the list. Later on however, it was updated and some still experienced some issues with verifying their Paypal accounts using their Nigerian bank issued debit/credit cards. As at the time of writing this post however, most of those issues had been resolved and cards like the Naira Visa and Mastercard are already working with Paypal Nigeria. I think it has to be a Naira card that is linked to your bank account and not a foreign currency card.

In the past, many Nigerians had opened and verified their Paypal accounts using a Payoneer Mastercard and VPN accounts and this cost them a bit more. However, it was not a safe or ideal way to use Paypal since one's funds can be frozen or limited when Paypal requests for further proof like a govt issued identity card and utility bill.

With Paypal Nigeria in town, Nigerians would be able to officially make payments with Paypal but there is still a little problem - They can't receive money with Paypal. I guess this is basically the same issue we have with Visa and Mastercard issued in Nigeria. Like Paypal Nigeria, Naira Mastercard and Visa are not designed to receive payments except for making it.

What benefit will Paypal have on Nigeria's economy? Why is Paypal coming to Nigeria this late? Well, given that Nigerians can only use Paypal to make payments to foreigners and foreign businesses, it might actually be taking money away from Nigeria and not adding to it. However, it may allow Nigerians to add value to their lives since things they purchase with Paypal could improve their lifestyle or business and hence make them more productive. Perhaps, Paypal came late to Nigeria because they were being too cautious.

To open an official Paypal Nigerian account, one just needs to go to paypal.com/ng and register. I tried verifying my account with my UBA Naira Mastercard and it worked nicely.