Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 29 July 2008 10:09
Opinion and Analysis
Page 5 of 7
On Thursday the 10th of July, I reported on the eBay
rebels’ attempt to discover what the banks thought about the safety of
the Direct Deposit system, in use for decades in Australia.
The article is
entitled “Rebels strike back at eBay and PayPal through Australian banks” and published the eBay rebels’ letter to Australian banks.
The first bank to have responded in the Commonwealth Bank of Australia,
and iTWire has received copies of the response, with specific
indentifying details anonymised.
The letters are as follows (in italics):
“From: XXXXXX
To: XXXXXX.net.au
Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2008 1:21 PM
Subject: Safety of Direct Deposit versus PayPal
“Dear XXXXXX,
“Many thanks for your query – apologies for the delayed response.
“There has certainly been much said in the media of late about PayPal’s
claim of superior safety over other forms of payments and this has been
used by eBay (who own PayPal) as a justification to force sellers to
offer PayPal exclusively.
“The Bank refutes these claims by PayPal and has submitted a submission to the ACCC to that effect.
“You should continue to have no occasion to feel that your account
information or your use of Direct Deposit in any way places you at a
greater risk of fraud.
“In summary:
1. All the banks including CBA have made considerable investments
to ensure the continuing security of Internet Banking services such as
Direct Deposit (or Direct Credit). In the case of CBA, nearly 50% of
all NetBank customers now have two factor authentication (with either
token or SMS) and our plans are to have the majority of our customers
with this enhanced level of security (which ensures that a customer’s
login and password credentials have not been compromised). We offer
this service to our customers free of charge and this same level of
security is not available to eBay/PayPal customers. I note you are
currently registered for NetBank but have not yet signed up for this
service. I would be happy to talk you through this service and increase
your security if you choose to do so. For detailed information on
security please refer to [here]
“2. Within the context of bank transfers, CBA has an extremely low
level of "recalled" or disputed transactions relative to the number of
payments processed each month and in the rare cases that errors are
made by customers, we have a excellent recovery rate. We believe that
PayPal is not a more secure payment method and that claims as such
cannot be supported.
“3. eBay cite data from the Australian Payments Clearing
Association in relation to international "Scheme" branded cards, but
neglect to mention that the fraud experience in relation to cheques and
debit cards is considerably lower than for charge and credit cards and
is not in comparison to Direct Deposit.
Continued on page 6.
