Beyond A Button: SeerBit Takes On The Real Gap In African Cross-Border Payments

In Accra, a beauty brand built its following on TikTok and Instagram, reaching customers in the UK who liked the products enough to buy. The merchant had done the hard part, creating something people wanted and finding them online. But when a British customer reached checkout on the brand’s website, the payment experience was unfamiliar, and the sale slipped away.

That scenario, described by Omoniyi Kolade, founder and CEO of the pan-African payments company SeerBit, captures the shift now underway in African digital commerce.

In August 2026, SeerBit announced it had integrated PayPal into its checkout infrastructure, allowing merchants across its 10 African markets to accept payments from PayPal’s more than 400 million users. The integration runs alongside the local payment methods SeerBit already supports, including cards, bank transfers, and mobile money, and gives merchants a single dashboard to manage local and international transactions.

The announcement was framed as a milestone for African businesses seeking global customers. But the more revealing story lies beneath the press release, in what the partnership exposes about PayPal’s complicated history on the continent, the limits of a single integration and where the real bottlenecks in African cross-border commerce have shifted.

PayPal’s relationship with Africa is marked by two decades of exclusion. In 2004, the company restricted inbound payments to Nigeria, citing fraud and chargeback risks, a policy that locked out a generation of freelancers and online businesses. A 2014 partnership with First Bank allowed outbound payments only, and a 2021 Flutterwave link served businesses while ignoring individual users. Those restrictions remained in place for 22 years.

During that absence, Nigerian fintechs including Paga, Flutterwave and Paystack built the infrastructure PayPal had declined to provide, capturing a domestic digital payments market that reached NGN 1.07 Q (USD 702.6 B) in 2024.

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Kolade is careful not to frame the SeerBit integration as a correction of that history. He describes a different set of changes that made the partnership possible now. African businesses became more digitally discoverable, consumers grew more comfortable buying across borders, and local payment infrastructure matured enough for global networks to connect to something reliable.

“The shift isn’t simply that African merchants suddenly want PayPal,” Kolade told WT. “It’s that the commercial relationship between an African business and a customer somewhere else in the world is becoming much more normal.”

What that relationship requires, however, is not simply a payment button, the founder emphasised. When SeerBit integrated PayPal, the company had to build additional merchant verification layers, because PayPal was extending its network to businesses it did not know directly.

It also created dedicated support and escalation processes, cutting resolution times for merchant issues from as long as 90 days to 24 hours. And it had to account for the fact that Africa is not a single payments market. Regulatory environments, banking infrastructure and settlement realities differ across every country SeerBit operates in. The complexity is not the integration itself, Kolade said, but everything around it.

Even after those layers are addressed, the merchant’s work is not finished when a payment notification arrives. Kolade argues that accepting payment is becoming less of a bottleneck, and that the harder problem now is what happens after the customer has paid.

A cross-border transaction must still be settled, often across multiple currencies and institutions. The merchant has to understand what they have actually earned after fees and foreign exchange costs, reconcile it against orders, and then access those funds where the business needs them. “For me, the next frontier is less about, can I accept this payment, and more about, can I make the money useful,” Kolade said.

That post-payment journey is where fragmentation becomes expensive. If a business sells into several markets and collects through different currencies, methods and providers, the money can pass through several institutions before it becomes usable. That ties up working capital, creates reconciliation work and makes it harder to understand true margins. It is a problem that a checkout integration does not solve, he reiterated.

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There is also a quieter dynamic at play. Kolade points out that the merchant does not have to be an exporter for cross-border payments to matter.

“Someone in Canada might want to order food for their parents in Nigeria. Someone in the diaspora might pay for groceries or a pharmacy purchase for a family member back home. An international visitor in Ghana or Kenya might want to use the payment method they already know,” he volunteered as examples.

In these cases, the merchant remains local while the customer is international. And the founder asserts that the boundary between a local business and a global customer is becoming less important, and that changes what merchants expect from their payment infrastructure.

PayPal’s broader strategy, PayPal World, is designed to connect global payment networks with local wallets and infrastructure rather than building the entire stack itself. Kolade sees this as a recognition that the foundational work has already been done by African companies. “This isn’t one company coming in to solve African payments,” he said. “A lot of that foundational work has already been done by African companies.”

Still, the integration raises questions that the announcement does not answer. Cross-border payments in Africa remain expensive, with the World Bank estimating that sending USD 200.00 to Sub-Saharan Africa costs more than 8% on average, compared with a global average of around 6%. Currency volatility and central bank restrictions on hard currency can delay or complicate settlements. Merchants will need to understand how PayPal transactions are priced, how quickly funds settle and how disputes are handled.

For PayPal, the African market is a growth opportunity at a time when its core markets are maturing. For SeerBit, the partnership strengthens its position as a checkout aggregator that handles both local and global payment methods. For African merchants, the integration removes one obstacle at the point of sale. Whether it changes the economics of selling across borders depends on what happens after the customer clicks pay.