Xoom lets you transfer money from PayPal to MPESA in Kenya within minutes at affordable rates

PayPal’s adoption in the country has had some tremendous results over the years, we’ve come along way when Kenyans could only withdraw via an Equity bank for some reason and some scrupulous third parties that charged a fortune to convert your balance to MPESA. Although there are efficient third parties that can help you transfer cash from PayPal to a locally accepted medium like MPESA, PayPal has gone out of the way to introduce Xoom – a baked-in facility that would easily allow sending money from PayPal in Europe to MPESA or some local bank accounts at lower transaction costs.

As of this writing, Xoom is supported in over 70 countries across the world – of course Kenya included, and can be used to pay for utility bills, reload mobile wallets or transferring your cash to a local bank account. In Kenya for example, you can easily send money from Xoom to mobile wallets such as MPESA or a bank account for Equity and SBM Bank customers. Gone are the days when the only option we had was transferring cash from PayPal to an Equity Bank account, SBM Bank is now onboard as well as the most convenient of them all – MPESA.

Safaricom also collaborated with PayPal to introduce PayPal to MPESA service that personally I’ve been gladly using, the only problem with the service was its limitation to Kenya (sorry other countries) and just because it was a third-party. There’s something unique with having a service that’s baked-in the application, normally the service runs efficiently and in case of issues you can still reach out to PayPal themselves. Additionally, with Xoom, users can transfer money in four foreign currencies; Euro, Pound, USD and CAD to their local currency.

How to transfer money from PayPal to MPESA, Equity Bank and SBM Bank using Xoom

• Head over to the official website: https://www.xoom.com/
• Enter the amount you want to send,
• Select the currency from the dropdown
• You’ll see the effective amount you’ll receive after the exchange rate
• Proceed with prompts on the medium you want to receive the cash