Sometime over a year ago, Equity Bank announced at GKenya that they will be striking a deal to get Paypal withdrawals possible for the online community in Kenya. This has been quite a headache with the available options being expensive and others unreliable. Techies have for the longest time resorted to either going all the way to open US bank accounts to get this to work and then get money wired back to Kenya, a process that proved quite a task.
The other method was barter trade that relied on how fat you could match up with someone else who had a need you could ssatisfy, hard cash versus paypal money.
Well this will be over as Equity Bank finally lives up to it’s promise of making this service available. A very well timed announcement that comes at a time when Equity Bank is facing a crisis with their ATM systems resulting to a PR disaster online.
So how does this work?
- Naturally you need to have a Paypal account.
- Link it to the Equity Bank Debit or Credit Card, I believe there will be a process where they ask you to request to allow for online transactions with your Debit card to take the risk liability to you the account owner. Credit card holders go through without hustle.
- You will then be able to make withdrawals to your bank account.
Costs and durations:
- The process will take you 5-8 days before the transferred money can reflect in your account.
- There is your usual Paypal fees that are between 2.4% and 3.9% + USD 0.30 per transaction.
- PayPal currency conversion fees may apply at 2.5% above the prevailing exchange rate.
- Sending money to your Equity Bank account will then be charged at 1.5% of the amount withdrawn.
- Equity will be the guys setting the USD to Kshs exchange rate, so they might pinch you here.
All in all, this is a welcome move that has been long overdue as quite enough international clients want to pay Service providers via Paypal and this has been a huge limiting factor to merchants and service providers in East Africa, particularly Kenya.
