American Express held a financial community update presentation today.

The slides and text from Chairman and CEO Ken Chenault are available online as are the slides and text from Al Kelly, Group President, Consumer, Small Business & Merchant Services.

Update - 3/5/06: See MasterCard - Write A Priceless Ad for details on the contest announced on tonight's Academy Awards broadcast.

MasterCard's TV advertising this week - including the TV ads for PayPass - seems mostly to be pointing to http://www.priceless.com.

Daniel Terdiman reports for CNET News.com from the Demo '06 conference about two companies who claim to handle secure payments while on the go without physical credit cards, cash or checks: Portland, OR-based mobile payments startup PayWi and San Francisco-based fingerprint biometric focused Pay By Touch.

SiliconBeat.com from Matt Marshall and Michael Bazeley of the San Jose Mercury News reports on Silicon Valley legendary investors Ram Shriram and John Doerr prowling in India for, among other things, mobile commerce investment opportunities.

Here's another new approach to democratizing consumer finance: LoanBack, launched back in December. LoanBack takes a much simpler approach than Zopa and Prosper.com - LoanBack is designed primarily for documenting friends and family lending.

Tony Munroe reports for Reuters on comments by David Nissen, chief executive of GE Consumer Finance, regarding opportunities in China that it's pursuing in partnership with Shenzhen Development Bank .

Bank of America, an Official Bank Sponsor of the 2006 U.S. Olympic Team, and Visa, also a sponsor of the United States Olympic Team, have announced the creation of a prepaid card for all U.S. athletes and USOC staff members participating in the 2006 Torino Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. The prepaid card, featuring the image of a flag bearing the U.S. Olympic Rings, will be used by each athlete and staff member for their daily per diem at the Games.

Andrew Reinbach, editor of Electronic Payments Week, has recently written about the pressures that credit card issuers are facing with respect to the profitability of their portfolios. Here's his analysis - posted with permission.

Sara Silver reports for the Wall St. Journal on plans by Motorola to add an "M-Wallet" to its cellular phones to enable payment using the phone at POS checkouts and the transfer money to others similarly equipped. According to the story, Motorola plans to distribute the service through wireless carriers who will price and market it to their customers.

Eric Dash reports for the New York Times on Visa USA's new Life Takes Visa advertising campaign that "hopes to rebrand the company as the payment partner in people's lives."

Visa Commercial has released the global Commercial Consumption Expenditure (CCE) forecast for 2006 that shows steady growth in business and government spending worldwide. Using the CCE index, Visa Commercial predicts global CCE in 2006 will be US $64.8 trillion, which represents a 6.6 percent increase over 2005 estimates of US $60.8 trillion.

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

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