The AP reports from Atlanta on a teacher gift card program by State of Georgia that provided a $100 gift card to Georgia teachers to use for purchasing office and school-supplies. The release of the cards coincided with Georgia's four-day sales tax holiday, when the state's tax is waived on clothing, school supplies and some other items.

The latest Nilson Report has arrived featuring an in-depth look at general purpose cards in the Latin America market (subscription only). This issue also has articles discussing store cards in the US and part 2 of an article on US commercial bank cards.

The Merchant Account Blog from MerchantEquip.com reports on a joint news release that was issued just a few days ago from Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Diners Club, JCB and Discover outlining what businesses need to do to secure cardholder data.

Paul Korzeniowski writes for Investor's Business Daily about "identity-based encryption" - a new approach that simplifies the management of encryption keys by using something like an email address (an identity) as the basis for a public encryption key. Korzeniowski reports that Ferris Research did a cost comparison between the IBE and PKI approaches and found that an IBE system costs one-fourth as much to operate as a traditional PKI-based approach.

Glen Fest writes for Bank Technology News about the efforts of one financial institution, San Antonio-based Frost Bank, to implement stronger online authentication for both its consumer and business customers. "We developed a fraud framework, and recognized that each channel had channel-specific anti-fraud systems," says Uday Shetgero, Frost Bank's svp of Internet security. Fest writes that "looking at fraud as an enterprise problem helped Frost determine the levels of risk each area and transaction level represented, which provided a guide to adopting varied authentication strategies across retail, commercial and telephone banking."

Australia's newest payments processing business, Strategic Payments Services Pty Limited (SPS) has appointed Mr Adrian Cosenza, former Group Executive and Head of Group Strategic Development at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, as its Chief Executive Officer. SPS is Australia~s newest payments processing business focused on delivering innovative and cost effective payment processing services to the Australian and regional market. SPS is a joint venture between Bendigo Bank Limited (40%), Customers Limited (40%) and MasterCard Asia/Pacific (Australia) Pty Limited (20%).

Scott Burns writes about Tricia, a blogger who lives on the Michigan peninsula, who is 29, married, the mother of a 4-year-old son, a college graduate and a homeowner - and who, with her husband, have a negative net worth of $48,477. She writes regularly about her story on her weblog: www.bloggingawaydebt.com. Burns says "she writes, step by step, about what she is doing to reduce expenses. She's shy, but when it comes to true grit, she's at the top of the scale. It's all there."

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