The card market in the UK is nearing completion of its "chip and PIN" initiative -- replacing mag stripe only cards with cards containing chips and moving the customer from written signatures to PIN's.

Ross Anderson, Mike Bond, and Steven Murdoch have written a white paper titled "Chip and Spin" that addresses their point of view on this migration of the UK card market to "Chip and PIN". See their Chip and Spin website for more background on this thinking.

Baseline reports on organized crime activity on the Internet.

The Payment Card Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia has announced two new publications.   » Continue Reading

Authorize.net has announced the completion of its beta release of its new Virtual Point of Sale product. VPOS is designed to enable retail merchants using a PC equipped with a mag stripe reader to utilize the Authorize.net payment gateway.   » Continue Reading

Celent analyst Alenka Grealish writes for Bank Systems and Technology about business-to-business electronic payments and why higher volumes can be expected over the next five years.

Despite the formidable incumbent status of the check in business-to-business transactions, its dominance will wane. Various industry, technological and regulatory trends will propel the adoption of e-payments. The drivers of adoption include both collaborative and competitive forces and players outside the banking realm. The era of banks' molding of payment systems in their favor is over. Next-generation payment systems will be structured with corporations' needs in mind and will be influenced by technology providers.

Andrew Kantor reports for the Roanoke Times on that city's recent launch of eCheck acceptance.

The program lets people pay bills without using a credit card, benefiting both users and the city. That's because American Express, Discover, MasterCard and Visa charge Official Payments (the company that handles the city's credit-card processing) for each transaction. This cost is passed on to customers in the form of a "convenience fee" of 2.75 percent of their bill.

Accepting payments by check means the city doesn't have to charge those fees, but retains the speed of an all-electronic payment. "I don't have a person back here opening up the envelopes and sorting them out," Powers said. "It's already there. We submit it, we hit it, we get the money."