Paypal sees ‘great opportunity’ in Pakistani market

KARACHI: Responding to Pakistan’s invitation to couple of global online payment giants Paypal and Alibaba to start operations in the country, Paypal says it might launch services in the Asian country.

According to a website Valuewalk, Paypal responded to their email regarding their interest to work in Pakistan.

“As a global payments company, PayPal is constantly innovating and looking for new ways to meet the needs of our customers around the world. As we look at expanding our global footprint, we see Pakistan as a market with great opportunity, but we are not able to comment on future plans.”

Following Pakistan’s invitation to couple of firms, the move follows a decision by the global Financial Action Task Force to remove Pakistan from its list of high-risk and non-cooperative jurisdictions linked to money laundering.

Neither US-based PayPal nor Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba (which operates a service called Alipay) currently work inside Pakistan, which had strict regulation until recently limiting online payments for services.

Local vendors instead offer cash-on-delivery options.

State Minister for Information Technology Anusha Rahman said in a Monday statement that following the central bank’s decision to announce new rules for e-commerce, the government would “solicit mechanism to coordinate with international e-commerce players such as PayPal, AliBaba etc encouraging them to establish their setup to enable e-commerce services in Pakistan.”