According to the "All About Rewards" survey of moms nationwide, conducted by Harris Interactive and commissioned by the Disney Rewards Visa Card from Chase, 41 percent of moms use a rewards card but many are not redeeming the rewards they have earned.

David Haskin writes for TechWeb about six mobile innovations that he says "will change your life" - including "Pay By Phone". He points, in particular, to the progress being made with mobile payments in Japan by NTT DoCoMo.

MasterCard Worldwide has announced that it is introducing a new system enhancement and service designed to increase the use of Flexible Spending Accounts and other medical reimbursement plans by enabling third-party administrators to substantiate purchases in real time using item-level data collected at the point-of-sale. MasterCard says that the service, which has a patent pending, is the first offering of its kind and provides a more streamlined solution for benefit administrators and merchants.

The Financial Services Technology Consortium has announced the "Authenticating the FI to Consumers" project, a follow-on to the recently concluded Better Mutual Authentication Project. The project intends to develop use cases dealing with authenticating the FI to consumers, along with applicable threat analyses, processes, evaluation metrics and the testing of combinations of various important emerging technology solutions against Financial Services community use cases and requirements. A project prospectus is available from Dan Schutzer or Chris Nautiyal at the FSTC.

TowerGroup has announced a new research report titled, "Bank Account Statements: Underestimated Underutilized, and (Finally!) Undergoing Renewal," by Kathleen Khirallah, Research Director of the Retail Banking Practice, concluding that "many banks, thrifts, credit unions, and finance companies continue to regard account statements as a legal or regulatory obligation -- rather than a strategic communications vehicle that affects customers' perceptions of the institution." As a result, she argues that too many banks are missing key opportunities to proactively manage dialogue with customers -- and that paper based account statements have the potential to provide a high degree of personalization in customer communications.

Mercator Advisory Group has released a new report titled "Declining Credit Card Growth: A Glass Half Full" that explores the declining growth rates in credit card outstandings and payment volume.

Michael Clarke reports for This is Money from the UK on the results of recent Datamonitor research commissioned by PayPal that concludes that online retail spending in the UK is likely to reach £21.6bn by 2010 with overall online spend, including services, reaching £39bn by the end of the decade. The study indicates that the "most lucrative online shopping sectors by that date will be food and grocery, which will account for a third of online spending, followed by clothing and footwear. Spending on downloads will reach £1.7bn in the next five years - a ten-fold increase."

The Direct Response Forum's annual conference is being held next week, August 13-15th, in Boston. This year's keynote will be given by Jack Stephenson, head of McKinsey & Company's North American Payments Practice. The full agenda for next weeks's event is available online.

Vindicia's Gene Hoffman tells us that the new Vindicia CashBox payment management service is specifically designed to meet the needs of merchants selling digital content or "software as a service" online. CashBox helps these kinds of merchants both manage their payment processing much more efficiently (especially for handling recurring payments and for handling chargebacks) as well as providing customer lifecycle management services to optimize top line revenue. We expect to hear more from Vindicia about CashBox's payment management capabilities when it's officially launched soon.

Coleen Shoji, Vice President and Assistant Manager of the Bank of Hawaii's Cash Management and Commercial Deposit Management Center, writes for Hawaii Business about how small businesses can protect themselves against fraudulent ACH debits.

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