In Germany the banking industry has lost at least 2 high profile cases in the highest civil court in the recent years.
They are not allowed to change the terms of business without the customer actively accepting the change. This seems the most applicable case here. I guess such fee was not at all in their terms before, so just sending an email that now there is won't work.
Another case that loans must not have handling fees (on top of interest) might be less applicable here.
There was also a case affecting all businesses many years ago. A debt does not expire earlier than 10 years later. So if the business still owns the customer something, they can't just say, oh sorry it has expired earlier. This affects mostly gift certificates or prepaid phone subscriptions, but why not "inactive" money at Paypal.
worked for me until I logged in (EU), now it returns "he page you're looking for is no longer available.". I just checked in another fresh browser and I can read it fine.
Looks like it magically stops existing as soon as you log in from EU.
>Note: Personal accounts registered in Germany/Austria/Italy/Greece/Hungary/Poland are excluded from the inactivity fee assessment for 2022.
yep, excluded and apparently its secret! WTF does "for 2022" mean here? Are they planning to hide it until they can finally charge me?
They had to register as a licensed bank because E-money-institutes are a recent addition to EU law long after PayPal obtained its banking license.
The law is written such that you are either allowed to do nothing or you are a full blown bank. There is no carveout for startups or anyone who doesn't want to run a full bank.
You are saying the ECB should be having a bad time. Fair.
PayPal is a licensed bank in Europe [1]
[1] https://thebanks.eu/banks/16281/bank_identifiers
Edit: changed the link because it was a bit misleading