A UPI report in the Washington Times says that immigrants from Latin American and the Caribbean are going to send $25 billion in "remittances" from the US to their homelands this year.

A report released Friday by the Pew Hispanic Trust and the Inter-American Development Bank's Multilateral Investment Fund predicted that the amount of monies wired from expatriates in the United States to the "LAC" nations of Latin American and the Caribbean was growing at a record pace.

The Pew report is available (in PDF format) here.

Lucas Mearian reports that MasterCard will announce tomorrow the completion of a new payment-processing system.

The peak shopping season, which began Nov. 15 and runs through Jan. 6, will top off a record year with more than $1 trillion in MasterCard transactions, according to Jerry McElhatton, senior executive vice president of global technology and operations at Purchase, N.Y.-based MasterCard.

San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor reports from Hong Kong on the Octopus card.

Octopus is easily the world's most successful experiment to date in stored-value, electronic cash cards. Instead of pulling out bills and coins in subways, buses, fast-food restaurants and convenience stores, customers wave purses and wallets past devices that deduct dollars from their cards inside. These are not debit cards, the widely used system in the United States. With debit cards, money gets deducted from bank accounts during transactions. Octopus cards are the real thing when it comes to cash cards. They are equivalent to cash. You put value into them, spend it down and then replenish the money if you want to keep using it. They're like cash in another crucial way. If the user prefers, they are entirely anonymous -- that is, not linked to any bank account or other personal information.

An earlier report in ComputerWeekly mentions both Octopus and Sony's EDY e-purse as likely to succeed in their respective markets. Operating in Japan through a separate company named BitWallet, Sony's EDY electronic money system is being adopted by Japanese finance companies.