Australia’s limp government are still allowing Paypal to hold massive consumer deposits in Australia without holding an Australian banking licence despite the fact that they are globally renowned for massive numbers of consumer and merchant complaints about the way they have handed customer’s money. (Just Google “paypal complaints” to see a few)
Frerk-Malte Feller the former head of eBay in Germany who has recently moved to Sydney to replace Dinuke Ranasinghe as the managing director of PayPal Australia hopes PayPal will sign up every single Australian merchant now selling anything online within the next couple of years.

It seems the friendly group of Australia’s licensed banking oligopoly are too much mesmerised by their ability to levy huge fees and now to increase loan spreads with the dud government’s blessing, to be bothered to compete with their unlicensed competitor.
Paypal claim that 27 per cent of online shoppers prefer to pay with PayPal, more than Visa or MasterCard or any other method.

Paypal says that they have five million active accounts in Australia and the company’s statutory financial statements for 2008 show PayPal Australia increased its customer deposit base by more than 50 per cent in 2008 to $92 million from $60 million in 2007.
Whilst Australia has so little competition between its banks now (because slimy politicians have allowed them to reduce to so few that they can all do better by not aggressively competing) the country needs more banks, but we don’t need the unlicensed kind that don’t have the government controls that provide public protection.
America has recently introduced the world to calamity caused by failure of unsupervised financial institutions not being required to meet prudential control limits. Let’s not have it here also.