In an article titled 'How Mastercard, Visa Seem To Be Strangling Ecommerce," Marketing Sherpa publisher Anne Holland writes about her company's recent experience with their merchant acquirer's ecommerce merchant risk management practices.

I attended a talk at Stanford this afternoon on "Data Privacy" given by Sachin Lodha of the Tata Research Development and Design Centre in Pune, India. The talk was part of Stanford's Security Seminar series.

Mercator Advisory Group has announced a new research report titled "Total Transaction Security: Best Practices in Limiting Fraud Exposure Online and Offline" that traces the lifecycle of fraud from theft to detection to identify strategies for protecting payment transactions.

Grant Thornton has announced the results of its thirteenth Annual Survey of Bank Executives, concluding that bankers are most concerned about their abilities to retain deposits in the face of increased competition, retain key employees, and attract new business.

Keynote Systems has announced new consumer research showing that Discover, American Express and Chase provide the best online experience for prospective card customers. A PDF summary of Keynote's findings is available online.

Pay By Touch has announced that Gary Bender has been named vice president of biometrics at Pay By Touch where he will oversee Pay By Touch's biometric technology applications.

TextPayMe blogs about the use of their new SMS-based mobile payment service for face-to-face transactions -- such as paying the seller when you're picking up goods you're purchasing from a Craigslist listing -- following mention of the idea in a Search Engine Journal post about Google Payments last Friday.

Burt Helm reports for Business Week on increasing concerns about click fraud on Internet advertising - and on plans by Fair Isaac, a company with considerable expertise in the area of financial fraud detection, to announce at this week's Search Engine Strategies Conference that it intends to help the online advertising industry better address the growing problem of click fraud.

David Wyss reports for Business Week on last week's release of the Federal Reserve's triennial Survey of Consumer Finances.

Business Day reports from South Africa on mobile banking applications, a recent study done by Arthur D. Little on prospects for and progress in mobile payments, and comments from mobile payments software developer Craig Saks, COO at Cape Town-based Fundamo.

According to Saks, "few people will deny that mobile banking will become pervasive - it is just a question of what form it will take."

David Breitkopf writes for the American Banker about Stan Paur's view of the future of the US debit card market. Paur has been president and CEO of Pulse EFT for years and is about to step up from that role to chairman following last year's acquisition of Pulse by Discover.

Mike Arrington's TechCrunch blog takes a deeper look at Google Base and Google Payments (with screenshots) in a post written by Nik Cubrilovic.

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

• Digital Transactions: How Interchange Wars Are Lending Impetus to Instant Issuance
• Wachovia Rolls Out International ACH
• Financial Express (India): Visa warns cardholders against phishing e-mails
• Excerpt From 'Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID'
• VeriFone Delivering 50,000 Payment Systems to ICICI Bank
• Truworths Becomes First African Credit Issuer to Adopt Fair Isaac's Strategy Science Technology; South African Retailer Joins Top North American and UK Card Issuers Using Analytics to Drive More Profitable Credit Line Decisions
• Brits not bothered by credit card debt
• Betfair and PayPal agree on online payments deal
• Eddie Bauer, Inc. Obtains a License Under the Ronald A. Katz Technology Licensing, L.P. Patents
• Washington Post: Paying Taxes with Plastic May Not Be Rewarding
• Silicon.com (UK): IBM and Novell are expected to announce an open source response to Microsoft's forthcoming InfoCard identity management technology
• Carefree Brits lead 'spend now pay later' lifestyle
• SVC President and CEO Chris Haigh to Speak on Mobile Commerce at Intele-CardExpo