“Over time we plan to expand our service offering in Nigeria to include services that will lead to better experiences in online and mobile payment methods in Nigeria.”

According to Goldfield, the company is meeting the needs of millions of Nigerians that desire to engage in ecommerce on foreign platforms.

She said: “There are millions of people in Nigeria who are eager to engage in online commerce and our goal is to help them make payments more easily and securely. Currently, we offer Nigerians the opportunity to register for free for a PayPal account to make payments on overseas websites.

As of now Nigerians are only allowed to make payments overseas but in response to whether receiving payments from abroad will be an option anytime soon, Malvina told ITWeb Africa that “(Although) Nigeria is a very interesting market and over time we may expand our presence, but for now we are satisfied to help Nigerians register for free for a PayPal account and make payments on overseas websites,”

The largest market for PayPal is South Africa at the moment followed by Nigeria and Kenya.

(image credit: Robert)

Nigeria telecommunication operators will be competing to upgrade their big data technologies over the next few years to ensure they will effectively predict consumer behaviour, buying habits and choices of their customers.

According to a recent article in Leadership, the big data market is valued at more than $200 billion. MTN Nigeria, Globacom, Airtel Nigeria and Etisalat Nigeria — a total subscriber list of over 100 million —  are all deploying next generation networks (NGN) and BI software tools to analyse consumer behaviour. Airtel and Etisalat, for example, are spending $3 billion collectively to “retool” their networks in order to take advantage of big data opportunities.

Moreover, the article claims that MTN is spending $1 billion a year on its own network, and continues to extend its “footprints” into telecommunications, information technology, cloud-based services, and web hosting. MTN currently has the largest data centre in Africa.

Globacom is also following suit, with estimates suggesting that the company is spending $1.25 billion to build an IP network. Mohammed Jameel, group chief operating officer of Globacom said, “With the investments we have made, wherever you are you will be able to connect to the broadband internet”…”With Big data and connected devices emerging, we have to keep developing applications that will thrive on broadband.”

Although Africa is still developing its network infrastructure, it will be interesting to see how companies respond to emerging technologies and leverage tools like big data to gain a competitive advantage.

Read more here

(Image Credit: josef.stuefer)