After lots of confusion earlier this week, e-commerce juggernaut eBay has confirmed on Friday it has received approval from the Central Bank of Russia for PayPal to operate as a non-credit banking institution. PayPal thus now has a Non-Banking Credit Institution license (NBCI) in Russia, allowing it to do business within the country.
On Wednesday, eBay apparently released the news early on one of its blogs and then pulled it. While that blog post is still missing in action, we managed to snag it before it went down.
Here’s the relevant text:
eBay Inc. Government Relations is pleased to announce that this week the Central Bank of the Russia (CBR) approved PayPal’s Non-Credit Banking Institution (NCBI) application.
This license, a product of over two years of work by a core team of PayPal business unit and central function staff, will allow PayPal to operate a domestic business in Russia. The journey toward the NCBI license involved Government Relations arranging for and directly meeting with several departments in the CBR over many months, and educating and training CBR officials on how PayPal and electronic payments systems operate successfully around the world.
Curiously, instead of simply republishing this news, PayPal decided to published a completely different post on its blog (not eBay’s) today. Towards the bottom, there’s another definitive statement confirming the license (one sentence was oddly missing a period and the second paragraph was spaced incorrectly):
As required by the National Payment System Law, we officially applied for a Non-Banking Credit Institution license (NBCI) in Russia. The Central Bank of Russia has been a key stakeholder and enabler from the outset, actively helping us to fulfill all requirements. We’re excited that they approved our application, which is a major step in this process but we are still just at the beginning of our journey in Russia.
Entering a new country with a relevant business offer, a strong consumer value proposition and close relations with regulators is key for success. This has been our experience for over 14 years.
We’re confident that the local regulators will continue to be our highly valued partners as we develop our payment services for the Russian market.
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We’ll be watching to see what moves PayPal makes in Russia (unless eBay decides to pull this blog post too). We will keep you posted.
Top image credit: AFP/Getty Images
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