Stefanie Olson reports that Yahoo has removed some fees from its PayDirect person-to-person payment service.

In the last week, Yahoo split PayDirect to give customers two options. One, a free account, is designed for family and friends who want to exchange money online without using credit cards. (Previously, Yahoo charged all subscribers, even if they didn't use a credit card.) The "professional" service racks up fees from the customer who accepts credit card payments--a common practice for online auctioneers. Yahoo charges 30 cents plus 2.5 percent of the cost of each transaction made using the service.

Major processing companies typically decline to reveal figures on how much money is lost to fraud in Russia, citing security concerns. Estimates of fraud amounts vary from 1 cent for every $100 up to 1 percent of all card transactions in Russia.

MasterCard has announced its growth figures for the second quarter, 2002.

"The first half of 2002 was an historic time for MasterCard, as we completed our integration with Europay International and our conversion to a unified, shareholder-owned global payments company," said Robert W. Selander, MasterCard's President and CEO. "The strong growth we are announcing today clearly demonstrates that even in a weak global economy, our members and their customers are increasingly turning to MasterCard as their payment brand of choice." "Moving forward, we expect that the new global MasterCard organization will provide even greater business-building opportunities to the industry by delivering creative, high-quality and reliable payments solutions to customers, whether they operate in one country, on one continent, or in markets around the world," he said.

CW360 reports that the Edy electronic money system created by BitWallet, a 25-member consortium headed by Sony and NTT DoCoMo, is to be adopted by seven of Japan's major banks and credit card companies for use with their credit cards.

The Edy system, which is based on Sony's Felica contactless integrated circuit card, does not require the card to be inserted into a special reader. The system can be activated for money debits when the card is placed within 10 centimetres of an Edy sensor. As money is stored on the card beforehand, the payment process takes 0.2 seconds to complete. The in-store terminal communicates with the Edy data centre once or twice a day to reconcile transactions and to check for fraud.

Today, around 200,000 Edy cards have been issued. At least one quarter of these double as corporate ID cards for Sony, Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi and Sanden workers while around half have been bundled with Sony's Vaio W desktop personal computer. Transaction volumes are small. Each of the 100 stores currently online handles an average of around 1,000 Edy transactions per month but Yamada is confident the system will see around a 100-fold increase in transaction volume once AM/PM begins accepting the cards.

A front page story in this morning's Wall St. Journal reports on how regulators are cracking down on credit card lenders out of concerns that they have over-expanded their lending to more risky, sub-prime customers.

An effort to slow the growth of credit-card lending to high-risk consumers, while healthy for the economy in the long run, could damp consumer spending at a difficult time. Consumer spending has propped up the U.S. economy during its recent slowdown but has been accompanied by a rise in personal debt. In the last several weeks, makers and retailers of goods such as furniture and consumer electronics, along with consumer-entertainment venues such as amusement parks, have reported lower sales tied to worries about the economy and the stock market.