The Scoop
Payments giant PayPal is in talks with fintech players in Africa as part of plans to launch a new cross-border digital wallet platform on the continent in 2026, its head of Middle East and Africa told Semafor as the company seeks to capture a slice of the continent’s fast-growing market.
PayPal World, a new global platform, will enable interoperability, allowing people with local digital wallets to make cross-border payments or shop overseas. Users will pay using a PayPal button to connect with their local digital wallet, rather than having to set up an account with the US payments company. PayPal announced the project in July — unveiling partnerships with digital wallet providers in India, China, and Brazil — and said it would go live this year.
Otto Williams, speaking at Semafor’s Next 3 Billion event at Abu Dhabi Finance Week, said the platform would launch in Africa in 2026. “We’re looking to enable as many markets as possible on the continent through partnerships — wallet partners on the continent,” he said, adding that the company was “in conversations with stakeholders and ecosystem partners and players.” African partnerships would provide access to digital wallet users in the world’s youngest continent, offering PayPal huge growth potential in the coming decades.
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PayPal already partners with some fintechs in Africa, including M-Pesa and Flutterwave, to enable local payments. But PayPal World would not only enable payment overseas and switching between wallets, but merchants using PayPal could accept payments from local wallets without having to invest in new technology, such as point of sale (POS) machines, to integrate with the various providers.
Williams said the aim was to solve specific problems, such as being unable to pay for goods overseas because a digital wallet wasn’t backed by Visa or Mastercard, or the inability to scan a M-Pesa QR code to make a payment via a PayPal wallet.
Partners already announced for PayPal World include National Payments Corporation of India’s UPI, China’s WeChat Pay, Brazil’s Mercado Pago, which Williams said represented a combined total of 2 billion wallet users.
In September, PayPal announced a commitment to invest $100 million in the Middle East and Africa to drive innovation and support entrepreneurs. Williams said the funds would include venture investment.
“We’re looking at bringing more of our capabilities,” said Williams. “We’re looking at hiring staff across the continent and across the region to continue to scale the business.”
The View From The Chain
Brian Armstrong, CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, told delegates at Abu Dhabi Finance Week that the biggest innovation in payments in recent years had come through blockchain technology. “Crypto rails are the only rails that I’m aware of in the world that are fast, cheap, and global,” he said.
Armstrong, by way of example, said USDC payments could be sent anywhere in the world in less than a second for less than one US cent. “There’s no other payment rail in the world that can achieve that, and that is why we’ve seen stablecoins grow like crazy,” he said.
Armstrong also said “crypto now has a daily use case in stablecoin payments,” adding: “It’s no longer just a speculative asset class that’s purely focused on trading.”
Notable
- Ant International, HSBC, and Swift have tested cross-border transfers of tokenized deposits in a move that could streamline global blockchain-based payments, South China Morning Post reported.