Paypal Now Opening In Nigeria

(Reuters) - PayPal is entering 10 new countries
this week, including Nigeria, providing online
payment alternatives for consumers via mobile
phones or PCs in markets often blighted by
financial fraud.
Rupert Keeley, the executive in charge of the EMEA
region of PayPal, the payments unit of eBay Inc
(EBAY.O), said in an interview on Monday the
expansion would bring the number of countries it
serves to 203.
Starting on Tuesday, consumers in Nigeria, which
has 60 million users and has Africa's largest
population, along with nine other markets in sub-
Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America
will be able to make payments through PayPal.
"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.
Once the services go live, customers in the 10
countries with access to the Web and a bank card
authorized for Internet transactions will be able to
register for a PayPal account and make payments
to millions of sites worldwide.
Initially, PayPal is only offering "send money"
services for consumers to pay for goods and
services at PayPal-enabled merchant sites while
safeguarding their financial details. This is free to
consumers and covered by fees it charges
merchants.
"We think we can give our sellers selling into this
market a great deal of reassurance," said Keeley, a
former regional banking executive with Standard
Chartered Plc and senior executive with payment
card company Visa Inc (V.N).
PayPal does not yet cover peer-to-peer
transactions, which allow consumers to send
money to other consumers. It has not yet enabled
local merchants in the new markets to receive
payments, nor is it offering other forms of banking
services, he said.
A 2013 survey of 200 UK ecommerce sites by
Visa's CyberSource unit estimated that 1.26
percent of online orders are fraudulent and that 85
percent of merchants expected fraud to increase or
remain static last year.
CyberSource also estimated that suspicion of
fraudulent transactions result in 8.2 percent of
online orders in Latin America being rejected by
merchants, compared with 5.5 percent in Europe
and 2.7 percent in the United States and Canada.
Such fraud can include ID theft, social engineering,
phishing and automated harvesting of customer
financial data via botnets, or networks of
computers controlled by hackers.
A total of 80 million Internet users stand to gain
access to PayPal global services this week,
including those in five European markets - Belarus,
Macedonia, Moldova, Monaco and Montenegro,
four in the African nations of Nigeria, Cameroon,
Ivory Coast, and Zimbabwe, as well as Paraguay.
Internet usage figures are based on research by
Euromonitor International.
PayPal counts 148 million active accounts
worldwide.
Last week, MasterCard Inc (MA.N), the world's
second-largest debit and credit card company, and
a PayPal rival in payment processing, said it was
working with the Nigerian government on a pilot to
overlay payment technology on a new national
identity card.
PayPal has operated in 190 markets since 2007
and added three countries - Egypt, Georgia and
Serbia last year. Roughly a quarter of the $52
billion in payment volumes PayPal reported in the
first quarter of 2014 were for cross-border
transactions. PayPal reported $1.8 billion in
revenue during the period.