Rumour or Fact: Will FNB bring us PayPal in April?
Financial Mail has published an article that PayPal will be made available to South Africans by April to receive money. However these rumours are unconfirmed as FNB does not want to comment. The news had originally spread since yesterday on Twitter, and some Twitterer's even claim that they knew about it as far back as December. If this is true then this will be good news, as one of the biggest limitations to doing business on the Internet for South Africans are the lack of PayPal support in this country.
Although South Africans can have a PayPal account and make payments, they cannot receive money into their accounts, and withdraw that money to their bank accounts. There are speculations as to the reasons why PayPal do not offer this capability to South Africans. Some of these speculations are that the Reserve Bank makes it difficult for PayPal to offer this service to us, or that fraud is too high in South Africa, and even that our Exchange Controls are not PayPal friendly. Whatever the speculations, other payment methods such as 2Checkout and Moneybookers allows us to transact on the Internet.
Whatever the excuses, currently this PayPal issue is causing South African Entrepreneurs to face the following major problems on the Internet:
1) Many Affiliate programs on the Internet only supported payments in PayPal
2) Many customers on the Internet is used to PayPal, and do not trust websites who do not offer PayPal as a method of Payment
3) South Africans had to use Clickbank or 2Checkout to get payments via PayPal, but this still excluded them from the first opportunity.
4) Setting up accounts with Clickbank and 2Checkout is more costly than having a PayPal account.
By being able to receive PayPal payments in your PayPal account, which is like a Virtual Wallet, will enable you to charge for services and get payment for those services delivered. You will be able to do work for people outside of South Africa who are currently accustomed to PayPal.
PayPal is the worlds most used payment method, and this fact cannot be ignored.
To read more about the Information leak, you can visit the Financial Mail website at:
However whether the availability of PayPal in South Africa will be soon,
is yet to be learned, and whether this is just a rumor will also be
interesting to know.
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