Revolution Vs. Paypal
November 09, 2007 | by Christopher Nickson
A new service is taking on Paypal at its own game — and charging less.
Two months ago former AOL co-founder Steve Case mooted a new service called Revolution Money. Now it’s ready to take on Paypal.
Revolution went live yesterday, billing itself as “currency for the 21st century.” Those registered with the service will be able to transfer money from one subscriber’s bank account to another at no charge – Paypal charges for the service.
“We are going and disrupting an industry that has been complacent,” announced Revolution Chief Executive Jason Hogg. “And we are taking the power away from the networks and associations a la Mastercards, Visas and Paypals, and turing it back toward the consumers and merchants.”
The free money transfer service follows the Revolution credit card, which the company claims is more secure than traditional credit cards. Revolution cards don’t contain the owner’s name or cardholder information in the magnetic stripe, and all transactions are by a personal identification number (PIN), similar to the European chip and pin system. Finally, Hogg explained to Information Week, the card carries a disassociated account number – the account number on the card is different from the real account number.
In aggressive marketing, Revolution is charging merchants only 0.5%, rather than the standard 1.9% transaction fee of most credit card companies.
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Michael Oldenburg on Nov 12th, 2007 at 10:11 AM:
Hi Christopher,
The second paragraph of your story is inaccurate. With PayPal, it is always free to send money to another account holder. In some cases, fees on these transactions may be charged to the recipient (ie. if the sender were to use a credit card to fund the transaction). Receiving bank account/ACH transactions, like those you describe above, are always free for Personal account holders. It's what makes PayPal such a great service, as evidenced by our 164 million accounts.
You can find a detailed breakdown of our fee structure here: https:// www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-fees...
Michael Oldenburg
PayPal Corporate Communications