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Flutterwave, Nigerian and U.S.-based fintech company, has announced a partnership with PayPal to enable African merchants to easily accept payments from PayPal users globally through Flutterwave’s platform. In a statement released on Tuesday by Flutterwave, the fintech firm said the collaboration will unlock opportunities for African small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to do business around the world.

Accordingly, the partnership between Flutterwave and PayPal is expected to remove the significant barriers that prevent a lot of African consumers and businesses from carrying out seamless cross-border transactions and participating in the global digital economy unhindered.

“We are excited to bring PayPal’s fully integrated services to businesses across Africa," said Olugbenga Agboola, Founder and CEO of Flutterwave. "The collaboration reinforces our vision of creating a seamless digital payments system for Africa’s business communities that can now transact with international consumers."

Prior to PayPal's new collaboration with Flutterwave, the U.S. payment giant has been operating fully in only 12 African countries. These are the countries that can send and receive money on PayPal, albeit to varying degrees: Algeria, Botswana, Egypt, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Senegal, Seychelles and South Africa.

Businesses in most African countries, including Nigeria, can only send money via PayPal as they are not allowed to receive money. While PayPal has never given reasons why this is so, TechCrunch has alluded to the speculation that the reasons could be insufficient regulation and poor banking security in most African countries.   

According to Flutterwave, the company’s merchants across Africa can now add PayPal as a payment option when receiving money outside the continent. The service, which is already available for merchants with registered business accounts on Flutterwave, will be operational across 50 African countries and worldwide. Flutterwave hopes to also make the service available to individual merchants. The partnership makes it possible for Flutterwave's customers to connect with more than 377 million PayPal account holders globally.

The collaboration comes one week after Flutterwave announced its Series C funding to the tune of $170 million, which raised its valuation to over $1 billion. PayPal participated in the fund-raising, along with other investors like Avenir Growth Capital and Tiger Global, which led the Series C round.

“By working with PayPal, we can further strengthen our commitment to our customers and service users as we will be enabling them to transact and expand their business operations to reach new markets. PayPal’s global reach is unrivalled, and collaborating with them allows our customers to explore new markets where PayPal is embedded,” said Agboola.

The Flutterwave CEO told TechCrunch that despite having the largest payment infrastructure in Africa, the company wants to have all the important global payments systems on its platform. The Nigerian unicorn has previously partnered with Visa to launch Barter; Alipay to offer digital payments between Africa and China; and Worldpay FIS to facilitate payments in Africa.