As a sidebar to a longer story about PayPal's potential future plans, Business Week Online's Silicon Valley Bureau Chief Robert Hof interviews PayPal CEO Jeff Jordan.

Q: What merchants are you going after, and what can you offer them?

A: The bulk of it is large merchants. We're in conversations with a lot of these guys. The merchants right now, from the largest to the smallest, are very concerned about the cost of payments. The cost of their credit-card accounts keeps going up, and the merchants aren't happy about this.

Yesterday, First Data Corp. held an Investor Conference in Omaha. A webcast replay plus the presentation slides from the conference are available online.

Interestingly, FDC CEO Charlie Fote used the following statement to illuminate FDC's tag line "Making Life Easier":

We want to lead with our brands, to process any payment, from any device, at any time, to any account.

The emphasis right up front in Fote's statement about "leading" with FDC's brands seems to be a new one. Historically, FDC was largely content (except for Western Union) to be behind the scenes of its bank clients' brands.

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EUFISERV and China UnionPay have announced an agreement that will allow China UnionPay cardholders to access participating EUFISERV member ATM's for cash withdrawal. This is the first agreement that China UnionPay has made with a European processing company.

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• VeriFone and Pay By Touch Form Strategic Partnership for Biometric Payment Solutions
• Transaction Network Services Acquires FusionPoint Technology Solutions
• Pay By Touch Selects Cogent's Technology to Enhance Their Secure Biometric Payment System

Note: This posting is updated regularly throughout the day.