In early 2018, M-PESA partnered with PayPal to help its users transact between the two popular platforms with ease. Before that, the most straightforward way to transact would be to link your PayPal account to your Equity Bank account. While this method did work, it took a couple of days to complete a transaction, not exactly 21st-Century-like.  The new partnership aided by international mobile money enabler, TransferTo cuts that down to a much more reasonable 2-3 hours.

To take advantage of this, you need to be an M-PESA customer and you need to have a Kenyan PayPal account. That simply means that your nationality should be set to Kenyan in your Paypal account otherwise this won’t work.

  • Go to www.paypal-mobilemoney.com/m-pesa.You will need to log into your Kenyan PayPal account.You will have to agree to TransferTo’s terms and conditions for using the service.Add the Safaricom MPESA number you’d like to link to the PayPal account.You will receive a verification code on your Safaricom line via SMS text. Key in this code to complete the link.

How to Top Up your PayPal account with MPESA

  • Calculate the KES amount you need to convert to get the USD amount you want in your PayPal account.Open your M-PESA, select “Lipa na M-PESA”, then “Pay Bill”.Enter 800088 as the business number, and your phone number as the account number.You will receive an SMS confirming that USD were added to your PayPal balance. You can also check the status on the Transaction History page.

There is an easy to use Currency Converter on this page that is updated daily. It is also important to note that a transaction fee is also applicable.

Update: We have made a video of this tutorial. Watch it below.

How to Withdraw from your PayPal account to MPESA

  • Go to this page and enter the amount you would like to withdraw in USD.
  • Continue to withdraw and the converted amount will then be wired to your MPESA account.

It is worth noting that the MPESA transaction limits apply. This means every transaction is limited to Ksh. 70,000, the maximum balance an MPESA account can hold is Ksh 100,000 and the maximum daily transaction is capped at Ksh 140,000.

Given the domain name https://www.paypal-mobilemoney.com TransferTo’s Thunes has used for the Paypal integration, we can speculate that they are planing to other Mobile Money operators other than Safaricom M-Pesa in the new future.