Let me officially confirm that Malaysians can indeed accept PayPal withdrawals into Malaysian VISA credit card.

Boy, was that fast! Imagine that I did my PayPal withdrawal request on October 3, PayPal completed it on October 4, and Citibank cleared the withdrawal by October 6, making it 4 days tops! I’m telling you, my heart is filled with angels singing praises to God right now, I am so elated!

After this wonderful ordeal, here are a few info and tips I know so far that you may find useful:

1. I do NOT see any fee charged to my credit card by either VISA or Citibank. This means that the 1% VISA + 1% Citibank fee I was expecting is NOT applicable to foreign funds deposited to Citibank; the fee only applies to spending transactions. In total, the fees and charges I have to bear is only the USD5 that PayPal charges.
2. Remember that MYR rate against USD is determined through a managed float, meaning that the currency rate fluctuates based on market demand, although not so much due to Bank Negara Malaysia’s intervention now and then. If I remember what I heard through the radio correctly, BNM (Malaysia’s version of the Federal Reserve Bank) will ensure that MYR against USD will fluctuate by no more than 8% against the rate BNM originally pegs, which is RM3.48. In other words, withdraw your PayPal funds when USD is strong, so you get more of your money’s worth.
3. VISA determines the currency exchange rate for withdrawals to all VISA cards. You can use its online Currency Converter to check the prevailing rate for MYR versus USD, and then do your math from there. When I checked the rate October 4, it was USD1 = MYR3.45. On October 5, it was USD1 = MYR3.41. You notice the difference as well if you take a closer look at the PayPal Expanded Use charge in my Citibank statement.
4. If you haven’t already, read all about PayPal’s New Withdrawal Feature to VISA Credit Card here.
5. [EDIT] PayPal withdrawals are NOT considered credit card payment, but rather as an additional fund. This means that you still have to make your minimum monthly payment, silly. What? You think you got off easy with that?
6. [EDIT] Gosh, I wished I had saved that URL, but I read somewhere that once you reach a negative limit in your credit card (i.e. you pay more than you spend), you can request the credit card issuer to transfer the excess into a bank account of your choice (I swear I read that in the Citibank web site, but I’ll have to double check).
7. As I have shared in Wayne Liew’s and Gaman’s post, I found a slightly alarming piece of info from LiewFC’s comments which Public Bank Visa Electron users may not like:
   -
   vincent Says:
   December 9th, 2006 at 2:27 pm
   Got this reply from PB customer service today
   1. You are not allow to bank in foreign funds in foreign currency to the Visa Electron Card account. The card account only can accept funds in Ringgit Malaysia.
   -
   This MAY mean that PB Visa Electron users could not accept foreign deposits such as those by PayPal because the funds are paid in USD. I hope I’m wrong, and since that comment was done back in 2006, Public Bank may have changed its policy since. My prayers are with you
   [UPDATE 8/Oct/2007] I’m never been glad I was wrong about anything as I am now! Malcolm successfully had his funds transferred into his PB VISA Electron debit card, although I noticed that the exchange rate was significantly lower. For Oct 8, the rate was RM 3.40 per USD, but Malcolm got RM 3.36 per USD. Did Public Bank make any hidden charges on the transfer? If there was, it wasn’t apparent in Malcolm’s statement screen shot.

So there you go. I’ll make sure to spread this around, and I hope you’ll help me spread the good news too. Until then, here’s WebGrrrl.net happily reporting on the whole hoopla that is PayPal Withdraw to Credit Card feature, signing off, for now.

UPDATE: Pikey beat me to it, however he received it after a bit of difficulty whereby PayPal limited his account for a while to request Pikey for a faxed proof of his documentation. PayPal didn’t even make a beep when I did my withdrawal.

Feel free to bookmark this article and return to find out more about PayPal and credit card transfers. Accounts associated with the global standard visa card are more than likely to follow suit, whereas amex info and some capital one card flavors are subject to their own regional limits.

Just a quick update to show that PayPal has completed processing my withdraw request to my Citibank Visa card. It took approximately 24 hours for PayPal to do so, and that’s not bad at all. My Citibank statement doesn’t show anything yet, and from my experience it will take them at least three business days before the new balance is reflected in my account.

If everything is smooth sailing with my funds, I have huge plans for this dear ol’ credit card of mine But seriously, this opens up a big opportunity to e-commerce particularly in Sabah. Students in my E-commerce class at Open University Malaysia asked me every once in a while concerning the best ways to accept payment online for their budding business, an I’ve been recommending 2CheckOut and especially PayPal (and a workaround to accepting withdrawals), the latter due to its ease of accepting micropayments. Now that prepaid credit cards and debit cards are readily available, plus this cheap new PayPal feature, I can now see a further boost in electronic business in this state — if this isn’t easy enough for them, then I don’t know what else is.

Following up to my previous post, several people in Gaman’s site commented and wondered whether their card accepts withdrawals.

Here’s an easy way to find out (click on the images to enlarge):

1. Log into PayPal, and in your My Account dashboard click on Edit Profile.

2. In the Financial Information column, click Credit/Debit Cards.

3. You should see the Status in the right column. If your card accepts withdrawals, it should say so as in the screen shot below for my Citibank Visa.

I got the instructions in eBay. You should read it to find out more about this cool feature. Like I said, you stand a better chance using a Visa or Visa Electron card for withdrawals, no matter what PayPal states in the site. When I was in the States, my senior in college once mentioned that 70% of credit card holders in the States use VISA, while 70% of credit card holders in other parts of the world use MasterCard — I have no stats to prove that, but it never hurts to be safe

Gaman in Sabahan.com highlighted the new PayPal withdrawal option to credit card, which I think is great news to all non-US users around the world. However, he was disappointed that he wasn’t able to withdraw due to the fact that his registered card was a MasterCard.

I was curious to try the new feature myself on my Citibank Visa card. You can see in the screen shot that my small USD transfer is currently pending, so until I see the fund reflected in my card statement, I wouldn’t say that the transfer was completely clear and successful.

I’m anxious to see what the final amount will be like, after taking into account both PayPal and Citibank charges. Obviously, PayPal charges $5.00 per credit card transfer, as well as a 2.5% fee if you choose to transfer in a different, PayPal-supported, non-US denominated amount. I’m assuming Citibank might charge me for conversion of the amount to Malaysian Ringgit, but again, I’ll have to wait and see.

One thing’s clear — I’m going to keep a closer eye on the Ringgit rate against USD. Although the determined rate between the two currency is using a managed float (boy, am I glad I’m teaching economics, otherwise that means almost zilch to me!), by scanning through my credit card statement, the difference can be significant once the transfer amount and frequency increases. It may be just a difference of around 5%, but when accumulated… I suppose you can do the math.

By the way, you can also transfer to your debit and prepaid credit card if you wish to do so. You may have better luck using Visa, as it is the most used credit card brand in the States as far as my experience goes.