MPESA has surely transformed how money is send and received here in Kenya to say the least, it’s almost likely that every vendor out there can now accept MPESA payments compared to just a few years back. But there are some instances when MPESA is not an option, especially when paying for services offered by foreign companies such as Netflix.
Looking at local companies or those that at least have a physical local presence, you’ll almost certainly have MPESA as a payment option, but the same cannot be said for other foreign companies. While Safaricom has managed to forge several partnerships such as using MPESA to shop on AliExpress as well as on Amazon using western union, PayPal remains one of the most widely used form of payment for multinationals such as Netflix.
In our previous editorial, we highlighted how you could use MPESA to pay for your Netflix subscription in just a few steps, we also wrote about how you could send and receive money through PayPal using MPESA. The process to deposit money from your MPESA wallet to your PayPal account is pretty much straight forward.
A few things to do before we start;
While transferring cash from MPESA to PayPal should be a breeze, there are a couple of things you first need to do such as linking your MPESA number to a PayPal account.
How to Link MPESA number to PayPal account;
- Link your MPESA to PayPal account by signing up at the following link: https://www.paypal-mobilemoney.com/m-pesa
- Tap on “Get Started”
- You’ll be prompted to login into your PayPal account
- Once you’ve logged in, add your MPESA number as expected
How to deposit money from MPESA to PayPal account;
- Convert the amount you want to deposit from USD into Kenyan shillings from this link: https://www.paypal-mobilemoney.com/m-pesa
- On your MPESA menu, select Lipa na Mpesa
- Then choose Pay Bill from the options
- Enter “800088” as the business number
- Put your MPESA number as the account number
- Enter the amount in Kenyan shillings
- Put your PIN and complete the transaction
You should receive a confirmation text message in a few minutes and the amount should reflect in your PayPal account.
