Binance Pay sees growing interest in Africa, South Asia and Independent States

African, South Asian and Eastern European countries are using Binance Pay as a means to bridge cryptocurrencies as a payment source for goods and services, according to a regional Binance exec.

Binance’s payment arm shared updated data with Cointelegraph in an interview with regional business development lead Pakning Luk. Launched in 2021, the payments service has attracted over 120 million users in specific regions as it onboards major online merchant platforms and real-world retailers to its payment rail.

A strategic partnership with WooCommerce is also expected to expand the reach of Binance Pay, with an estimated 40 percent of global websites making use of the e-commerce plugin. The integration allows cryptocurrency users to make payments with 70 different tokens.

The partnership is tied to the footprint of merchants that WooCommerce serves, making Binance Pay a rail to cryptocurrency-powered payments for a massive amount of businesses and customers. Luk also highlighted remittance and online shopping as key use cases seen by its user base in regions like Africa, South Asia and countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Users are also able to pay for car hailing services like Uber, Bolt and Grab with crypto through an integration with an aggregator service:

“They are the infrastructure empowering us to facilitate this service. We built the front end that allows our users to book a ride with Binance Pay without directing them to an any other car hailing app.”

Binance Pay has also had a footprint in Ukraine since before the ongoing conflict with Russia began, through two merchant partnerships with local supermarket chain Varus as well as gas station chain WOG.

When asked whether Binance Pay envisioned itself as a competitor to the likes of PayPal in the future, Luk said that the service was more focused on building partnerships and working alongside industry participants.

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Suggestions of a becoming a possible crypto-to-fiat onramp for a service like PayPal was also an avenue worth exploring, as the service begins to view itself as a payment infrastructure in the mould of Visa or MasterCard.

“We would welcome global players like PayPal to be our channel partners who can then aggregate different payment methods, including crypto payment methods to allow merchants and the end users can choices to make payments with.”

Luk told Cointelegraph that Binance’s product team has a keen focus on compliance and the company has been licensing in different jurisdictions to ensure they’re meeting standards.

PayPal has already rolled out its own cryptocurrency service which enables users to buy Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies with fiat currencies.

Regulatory focus on the cryptocurrency industry has been heightened in the wake of the collapse of FTX and a handful of lending houses in the space.

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