I have had a PayPal account for the last 5 years and could only make purchases with it. It was more of a convenience rather than a tool for really transacting online. Following on the announcement by PayPal and FNB  of what is commonly known now as PayPal SA , I hastily rushed off to to the nearest FNB and opened an account with the accompanying Online Banking addon.

Back at the office I logged into FNB Online Banking and proceeded to link my existing PayPal account with my new FNB account. The process was smooth and was completed in under 5 minutes. All that remained was to wait for someone to hit the buy button on my site, and that happened this morning with an email from Paypal requesting me to confirm receipt of 300.30 Euros.

I logged into Paypal and was presented with a page ( See screenshot below )

As you can see PalPal sliced off a neat 12.06 Euros that left me with $277.02 after conversion to USD . So I accepted receipt of the payment and conversion. My next step was to head on over to FNB Online Banking , log in and make the withdrawal request from my PayPal account into my FNB savings account.

There were just five simple steps to complete on the FNB site to action the Withdrawal from PayPal to my FNB account. FNB prepared a quote that was valid for 4 minutes and takes a 1.5% cut ( called their commission )which in my case worked out to R40.54 . I was offered a conversion rate just 30 cents short of what is listed at XE Currency Service .

So to sum it up, from a Potential Cash value of R2973.00, 

Currency Conversion took R110.24

Paypal Commission R119.51

FNB Commission R40.54

and I am left with an actual amount of R2702.71

So what do you think ? I personally think we could really do with a commission reduction from PayPal, the FNB commission is reasonable, not sure if there are any other fees due as of writing this.

UPDATE 1

As of the time of this update 30 hours have passed with the transaction still reflected as "Pending" in my FNB account !

UPDATE 2 ( 12/04/2010 )

It took exactly 11 days, after initiating the transfer of the money from PayPal to my FNB account , for the funds to be cleared and made available in my FNB account !