We signed up for a Pay­Pal account ages ago and never got around to using to process pay­ments (we’ve got a mer­chant facil­ity with Comm­Bank so there was no great urgency to the situation) — and since set­ting it up the per­son respon­si­ble has moved on.

Our unver­i­fied account has never processed a sin­gle pay­ment, and yet with the amount of ID they require for some­thing as sim­ple as a con­tact name change you could get a pass­port in some countries.

Busi­ness Con­tact Name Change
To process your name change request, you need to fax in addi­tional infor­ma­tion. Please pro­vide a cur­rent photo iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and one of the other fol­low­ing documents:

• A copy of a valid photo iden­ti­fi­ca­tion show­ing your new name.
• Accept­able forms of photo iden­ti­fi­ca­tion are a driver’s license, pass­port or any other state or gov­ern­ment issued photo identification.
• A copy of a recent util­ity bill show­ing your new name and address exactly as they appear on your Pay­Pal account.
• A copy of a recent bank state­ment for the bank account listed on your Pay­Pal account (if applicable).

Please include a let­ter on com­pany sta­tionery indi­cat­ing the pri­mary email address, cur­rent name, address and tele­phone num­ber on the Pay­Pal account, the rea­son for the name change, and the new busi­ness con­tact name.

So that we can process your request effi­ciently, please ensure that your doc­u­ments are valid and leg­i­ble. As always, any per­sonal iden­ti­fi­ca­tion infor­ma­tion that you sub­mit to Pay­Pal will remain secure and will never be trans­mit­ted to any third party.

Pay­Pal have never had a rep as a par­tic­u­larly cus­tomer friendly organ­i­sa­tion, but this isn’t even ben­e­fi­cial to them! With no trans­ac­tions in the past and less doc­u­men­ta­tion than this required for estab­lish­ing a NEW account it doesn’t pose any cred­i­ble threat so far as hijacked accounts/money laundering/whatever goes, and they need to spend time review­ing doc­u­ments sent in a thor­oughly non­stan­dard way. The bank account ver­i­fi­ca­tion process is pretty good in terms of automa­tion (albeit risky — you’re essen­tially giv­ing Pay­Pal license to do what­ever with all funds in that account) — this is most cer­tainly not.

Any­one have any good, low % fee or cost/transaction way of hook­ing into CBA’s Evolve sys­tem? The appli­ca­tion doesn’t war­rant us spend­ing heaps set­ting it up just yet, and Pay­Pal are good at mak­ing things way too risky and dif­fi­cult. Grumble.