PayPal says it should enable withdrawals to Indian bank accounts for goods and services March 3, but personal payments will still be suspended.
Early last month online payment service PayPal stopped processing some transactions in India, and even reversed some funds transfers to personal accounts while it worked with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to “address questions” about the nature of PayPal’s service. Now, PayPal says it expects to be up and running in India again as of March 3, enabling withdrawals from PayPal accounts to Indian bank accounts for goods and services.
Personal withdrawals to Indian bank accounts will still be suspended: users will be only be able to get their money by check.
Transactions for goods and services to Indian bank accounts will now need to be tagged with a “purpose code” categorizing the nature of the transaction; PayPal says the purpose codes are required under new Indian laws for all cross-border transactions; depending on the amount of the withdrawal and purpose case, a bank may require additional documentary proof of the transaction, such as invoices and receipts.
The categories leave some organizations out in the cold; for instance, charities based in India cannot process contributions via PayPal under the new purpose codes.
Users whose withdrawals were suspended should see their PayPal balanced restores as of March 1, with fees and charges applied to the disallowed withdrawal transactions being refunded separately.
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RSSThe simple fact is that without the bankers’ knowledge of the entities involved in the transactions, PayPal, or any other non-bank provider, will always be handicapped. Non-bank providers can never guarantee anything for the buyer or seller because they simply don’t have the bankers’ knowledge of the entities involved.
PayPal is an unregulated, unprincipled, systemically dysfunctional, amateur organization (just like its ugly parent, eBay).
The head turkey at eBay, “Noise” Donahoe, has talked of the possibility of offloading PayPal because he is just barely smart enough to know that when the major credit card companies do get off their butts and introduce a like card/terminal-less payments system to complement their credit card system, they will do it properly, and the dysfunctional and “clunky” PayPal will then sink like a stone—other than, possibly, on what is by then left of the Donahoe-ever-shrinking eBay marketplace.
If Donahoe has any brain at all he will be actively trying to sell PayPal to the banks to complement their credit card system; but I doubt the banks would want to lower their image any further by associating themselves with the likes of PayPal; not even for a peppercorn consideration would the banks touch such an incompetent amateur operation as PayPal, I suspect.
Does anyone then think that “all the banks” are not watching this market segment with interest, and is it possible that PayPal (along with the upstart “Bill Me Later”) could be having a negative effect on their credit card business? Why then would “the banks” not be considering a like system to complement their existing card systems? After all, every internet banking user is already set up to receive such a service directly, efficiently and securely, from their bank. The simple fact is that anything that PayPal can do “the banks” can do so much better.
Do we then need to offer the banks and the major credit card companies another such monopoly-type situation? Ideally not. But, having said that, within the credit card system the individual banks do compete with each other on interest rates, etc.
Regardless, it would be nice to have a card/terminal-less system that worked efficiently and effectively—as does the banks’ credit card system. Regrettably (or thankfully, some say), PayPal does not have such a partnership with “all the banks” and so PayPal can never offer that same effectiveness.
My only surprise is that “all the banks”, via their credit card partners, have not yet announced their own system. When they do, it will be bye, bye, PayPal—you most ugly of daughters. And, more importantly, we will then have a system that works effectively, just like our credit cards do!
In support of the above comment I offer an introduction to the full sad/ugly story of eBay/PayPal at
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