A number of banks are making their first investor presentations of the year this week at the Citigroup Financial Services Conference in New York. Copies of their presentations are available online.

Holly Sraeel reports for Bank Technology News on CheckFree's twenty-five year history in electronic payments.

Vesta and Axalto have announced they are teaming up to offer prepaid wireless customers new payment capabilities from their mobile phones. Vesta and Axalto say their solution will serve the rapidly growing U.S. population of prepaid wireless consumers with real-time top-up, leveraging the security and ubiquity of the GSM SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card in their phones.

MasterCard has announced a partnership with Official Payments Corp. to offer a specially reduced convenience fee for MasterCard cardholders to pay their federal personal income tax balance due payments online.

Tracey Vispoli, vice president, Chubb & Son, cautioned bankers about the potential costs associated with a security breach at a recent American Bankers Association conference.

"For many financial institutions, a network security breach involving the release of confidential customer information is not a matter of if, but when. It's time for financial institutions to further tighten their data security controls and to prepare for the potentially significant financial cost of this risk."

TowerGroup has released a new report that concludes the largest U.S. banks (those with assets of $80 billion or more) have historically used an individually tailored approach to core banking systems that lack vital integration with the other core applications. These banks continue to show no indication of adopting new integrated core systems.

Robert Guth reports for the Wall St. Journal on a new banking industry initiative called the Financial Institution Shared Assessments Program expected to be announced today to guard customers against security breaches.

Eric Dash reports for the New York Times on the "vastly different approaches" being taken by Visa and MasterCard in marketing their security initiatives to consumers and merchants.

Experian Consumer Direct has announced the results of a nationwide study on the
differences between consumers in high and low credit score ranges.

MarketingSherpa reports on a case study at Newegg.com testing several different Bill Me Later payment options with online shoppers - after having earlier experimented with PayPal as a payment option.

Note: Throughout the day, as Payments News happens, this post is updated.

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