As mentioned yesterday, West Coast Bank is now offering its banking customers the Coinstar line of gift card, prepaid wireless, cash card, and phone card products. According to a press release issued this afternoon, included in the products being offered are gift cards from food, entertainment and retail businesses including Chili's, Borders, Starbucks, Circuit City, AMC Theatres, KB Toys, and Timberland along with Green Dot prepaid debit cards.

Andy Williams writes for CR80News.com about how the big three US payment card brands remain bullish on contactless payments - one year after nationwide launches began - as key to their strategies to displace cash payments.

Visa USA has announced that Visa TravelMoney cards will now be available in more than 1,550 Safeway store locations nationwide, including participating Safeway, Carrs, Dominick's, Genuardi's, Pak 'n Save, Pavilions, Randalls, Vons, and Tom Thumb stores. NetSpend will market the reloadable prepaid travel cards and process transactions for the issuer, Inter National Bank.

Wolters Kluwer Financial Services has announced results of a recent survey of financial organizations in which eighty percent of financial organizations responding said their organization currently offers Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) or plans to do so in the next year.

TowerGroup has announced new research examining the US merchant acquiring business - concluding that further concentration of the large merchant acquirers in the United States is unlikely and that growth opportunities are likely to come from competition either between U.S. acquirers or with those outside the United States.

Cara Nissman writes for Bankrate.com about how more colleges and universities are deciding that it's just too expensive for them to accept credit cards for tuition payments. We reported earlier this month on a move by Brigham Young University to push its students to using echecks for tuition payments.

Arcot Systems has announced that All Points Capital, a subsidiary of North Fork Bank, has chosen the Arcot's WebFort multi-factor authentication solution for authenticating financial institution customers into its online transaction portal. The ability to also use Arcot's solution for secure digital signing of electronic documents was an important factor in All Points' decision.

Vauhini Vara writes for the Wall St. Journal about the steps various US banks are taking to implement stronger authentication for customer access to their online banking systems - at least partially in response to new security guidelines from the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) issued last year. One byproduct - increased customer service calls to banks as some of their consumers struggle to get used to the stronger authentication.

Discover Financial Services and JCB have announced a strategic relationship "that will lead to increased card acceptance for both companies." The arrangement provides for acceptance of JCB cards on the Discover Network in the U.S., and of Discover Network cards on the JCB network in Japan, and acceptance of PULSE cards at targeted ATMs in Japan at the option of the card issuer.

• First Tennessee Partners With CompuPay to Offer Payroll Services to Business Clients
• Debix: 40% Of Fraud Alerts Are Not Set Properly, Leaving Millions Unprotected Debix is Providing a Free, Automated Service That Sets Fraud Alerts Properly
• Entrust Gains Momentum in Top US Financial Institutions With Zero Touch Fraud Detection(TM) Solution
• RSA(R) Authentication Client Middleware Achieves FIPS 201 Validation
• Danier Leather Completes Rollout of Fujitsu Retailing Framework Technology
• PNC Introduces Free ATMs Worldwide
• Innovative Card Technologies Strengthens Commitment to Promoting Open Authentication; Joins OATH as Coordinating Member
• EchoStar Expands Relationship with First Data; Remittance Processing Division Awarded Additional Business
• Survey Reveals Consumers Find Gas Rebate Credit Cards Effective at Saving Cash at the Pump
• WSJ: PNC to Join Wave of Banks In Dropping ATM Fees

We have received news of the following recent management changes:

• Michael Snitman has been named vice president and general manager of the public sector for TransUnion.
• Chapin Titcomb has been named Business System Consultant - Mobile Payments at Wells Fargo Bank.
• Steven Landberg has been named Managing Partner of Claymore Partners, a retained executive search firm specializing in senior placements in the payments arena. Phone: +1.203.987.4641.
• John Hagy has joined MetaBank as Chief Risk Officer and General Counsel for all business units of the Meta Financial Group.