eBay Inc., the online auction house, will start collecting a fee to manage money that customers have on deposit in its PayPal Money Market Fund, the company said in a letter to customers.

PayPal, an electronic payment service with some 87 million customers, sweeps funds that customers keep in their accounts into the money market fund.

The fund currently pays a 7-day average yield of 4.38 percent, the highest rate of any money-market fund in the United States, according Peter Crane, managing editor of IBC’s Money Fund Report.

Starting March 1, PayPal will cut that yield by one-quarter of a percentage point to help pay expenses for managing the money, PayPal said in the letter that it started sending to customers via e-mail on Monday. A copy was obtained by Reuters on Tuesday.

Source: Reuters