Hi David,
We do already accept donations directly to our bank accounts and this is also how most of the sponsors paid us. This is the best way for us financially as it costs us nothing. (bank transfer cost is usally paid by the sender and is lower for higher amounts as it's normally a flat fee)
But for small transactions like the matching fund, where we typically receive 5-50USD/donation an assumed fixed cost of 5-10USD will result in transaction fees of 20-200% of the donation, which is why we need another way to accept those payments.
I looked at a few different payment provides a while ago and tried to figure out how much they charge:
From that list, some were unusable from Switzerland, because they're US-only and some require monthly fees.
At the end we were left with a small list of Paypal, Google Checkout and Click&Pledge via SPI. If you know another provider which doesn't require monthly fees, please tell me
Google Checkout was ruled out as it seems to need a Google Account, whereas Paypal can be used without a paypal account and just requires a credit card.
About the fees: Unfortunately all those payment methods either cost a percentage of the donated amount or are only usable within one country and/or need the donor to set up an account.
As we want to make it as convenient as possible to donate money, we need to accept credit cards (which we do by using PayPal)
IMO it's still better to pay some money to a payment provider instead of not receiving a donation at all, because the donor decides not to donate instead of using a more complicated method which is cheaper for us.
There are other risks with PayPal, e.g. that they lock our account for some reasons. We mitigate this risk by transferring the money from the PayPal account to our bank account. So in case, this happens, we'd just replace the PayPal donate button on the website.
SPI Click&Pledge vs Paypal: The main reason we use PayPal is to make make book-keeping easier, as we can export all the payments from PayPal and don't have to manually add up the amounts from emails... And another benefit is that it's cheaper. According to the SPI treasurer, Click&Pledge charges SPI 4% + USD 0.35. SPI will then charge an additional 5% for their costs. (
http://www.spi-inc.org/projects/associated-project-howto/)
Philipp