According to a new study commissioned by Visa USA, significant others and moms are the most troublesome on holiday shoppers’ lists, and the majority of Americans (83 percent) expect to spend up to three hours researching, shopping and buying a single gift.

In an article titled 'Payroll cards offer convenience at lower cost", James A. Ambrosio writes for Bankrate.com about the advantages of payroll cards - particularly for the unbanked.

We have received news of the following recent management changes:

• Beverly Kennedy has been named Chief Operating Officer of PayFlex Systems USA, Inc., an administrator of employee benefit programs. Kennedy joins PayFlex from First Data Corp. where she served as President of Healthcare.

Becky Yerak writes for the Chicago Tribune about yesterday's announcement of the upcoming spin-off of Discover from Morgan Stanley - quoting David Nelms, Discover's chairman and chief executive, as saying the spin-off is "good for us and good for Chicago."

Glenbrook's Carol Coye Benson had been initially skeptical about Intuit's recent announcement to acquire Digital Insight - as she says "after all, banks have had a long and somewhat rocky road with Intuit over the years and some seem to still have very mixed feelings about their basic value proposition." But Carol has recently become convinced that the new Intuit/Digital Insight business combination could provide some very real value to a bank's small business customers.

Richard Dalton writes for Newsday that reports of gift card numbers being stolen off racks in stores and then hijacked once loaded with funds are not a large-scale issue. Dalton reports that "Newsday examined about two dozen gift cards from a variety of retailers with an online presence. Nearly all of them had scratch-off codes to prevent theft."

Obopay has announced partnering with Helio to offer the Obopay end-to-end mobile payments solution to Helio members.

Banksys sends word this morning from Brussels that on Saturday, December 16th, the milestone of 1 billion electronic transactions for 2006 was reached in Belgium. Banksys continues - saying "armed with their debit cards, Belgians have set a new record on December 16th. One week before Christmas, Banksys, the Belgian electronic payment services provider, recorded a yearly total of more than one billion transactions, for the first time in our country’s history."

Online Resources has published a new study of web-based collections and payments that demonstrates the growing adoption of the Web channel for debt collection.

Jeffrey Grau writes for eMarketer.com about CyberSource's recent survey of online ecommerce fraud that estimated ecommerce merchants in the US and Canada will lose $3.0 billion to online payment fraud in 2006, representing 1.4% of total online sales.

Landon Thomas Jr. reports for the New York Times on yesterday's announcement by Morgan Stanley that it plans to spin-off its Discover unit by summer following an internal strategic review of the business. The on, off, now on again spin-off plan could result in Discover having a public stock market capitalization of as high as $10 billion - if it's not first taken over by any of the large card issuing banks in the US.

• First Data International Renews Major Processing Contract with Lloyds TSB
• Top Mexican Bank Cuts Fraud Across Its Enterprise Using Fair Isaac Falcon Technology
• TSYS Prepaid Surpasses Milestone of 11 Million Healthcare Accounts
• The Center for Financial Services Innovation Announces New Board Members
• First Data Renews Advanta Bank Processing Agreement
• LendingTools.com Sees Surge in Biometric Security Deployments as Banks Move to Meet FFIEC Deadline
• Garanti Bank Selects Gemalto for Europe's First Commercial Deployment of Contactless Banking Cards
• nCipher introduces world’s first embedded cryptographic Hardware Security Module