What is Moneybookers?

Moneybookers is an electronic money transfer company providing alternative payment solutions to ecommerce industry. It is approved under UK and EU laws. The Financial Services Authority (FSA) in the UK controls it.

Moneybookers is widely used money transfer system and it claims that it has more than 8 million account holders as on July 2009.

Who use Moneybookers?

As betting is legal in UK, it is mostly used for the payments for casino and other gambling. It is also used for online payments of purchases of small amounts.

As the charges for telegraph transfer are relatively high, most people find Moneybookers a suitable way to transfer money within Europe.

Most companies in the European Union utilize Moneybookers for customer to customer transaction as well as business to consumer payments.

By using Moneybookers it is possible to withdraw money to Indian bank accounts. That is why most of the small companies, who get outsource work like software development, designing, data conversion etc... use Moneybookers as a payment mode.

How to Open a Moneybookers Account?

Opening an account on Moneybookers is very simple. All you require is a valid email address. Moneybookers offer two types of accounts – personal and company account. Personal account can be opened for free. While for transferring money fee of 1% of the amount is charged, for receiving funds, there are no fees.

To avoid and limit scams like money laundering, identity verification is necessary in Moneybookers. To increase the upper limit of transferable amount additional verification is needed. Once verification is done, one can transfer up to Euro 50000 or its equivalent in 90 days.

How to Add Funds to a Moneybookers Account?

When a payment is made, Moneybookers send an email to receiver notifying him about the payment. The funds can be added to Moneybookers account by the account holder by following ways:

1. For any payment or deal, one can charge the credit card. For this purpose he can use Amex, Visa or Master card credit card. The processing fee applied is 2.5% of the amount of payment. To verify the credit card of people in countries like Asia, Africa Moneybookers demands extra documents. A scanned copy of identity proof like driver’s license or voters ID card is needed to be sent to them by email or fax it. For payments of minor amounts this process can prove time spending.

2. You can also use a bank account for funding Moneybookers. But this mode is available in certain countries only. For this, you have to use wire transfer or SWIFT method. There are no charges applied for this method.

3. In UK and France you can add funds to your Moneybookers account by cheque.

4. If any other Moneybookers account holder sends you money, they are automatically added to your account.

How to Withdraw Money from Moneybookers Account?

You can withdraw money from Moneybookers account to a bank account or Visa credit card directly within European countries. But if you want to withdraw money from Moneybookers account to a bank account in other countries, then the processing fee is applied and it is decided according to currency and country. Indian citizens can only withdraw money from Moneybookers account by requesting cheques. The fees charged for it are 3.5 Euro (approximately 200 rupees).