Ross Gittins writes in the Sydney Morning Herald about what happens behind the scenes in Australia when a plastic card payment is made.

This web of subterranean payments matters a great deal to the banks, which means they put a lot of marketing effort into manipulating our choices, pushing us in directions that maximise their profits.

This is stuff you and I aren't meant to know about. And it's so complicated many people would prefer not to know. But if you like to know how the big boys are trying to manipulate you - and how the Reserve Bank is fighting back - keep reading.

Simon Property Group has announced that it has voluntarily entered into a consent agreement with New York State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer to resolve the dispute regarding the Simon Visa Giftcard program.

Wells Fargo has announced that its entire network of 6,200 ATMs is now web-enabled.

"Very few of our customers are single-channel users," said Jonathan Velline, head of Wells Fargo's ATM Banking. "Today more than 51% of our checking accounts are accessed online and our customers are conducting as many transactions at our ATMs as they do with our tellers. We've completely integrated our webATM machines with all our other channels, so customers can access information and conduct transactions in whatever channel that best suits their changing needs and preferences."

Visa USA has announced Visa Service Views, a new suite of systems monitoring tools that summarize the health of Visa's multiple payment streams in real-time.

"In a business that handles $1.7 trillion a year, and more transactions in an hour than all the world's stock exchanges handle in a day, every second lost is worth millions," said Keith Hunter, Executive Vice President of Global Processing Services at Inovant LLC.

"Visa Service Views has enabled us to shift our management of the global payment system from measuring the performance and reliability of technology platforms, to measuring the performance of specific Visa business services."