Glenbrook will be offering an expanded series of Payments Boot Camps for 2007 - beginning in February in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Atlanta in March. For 2007, we're also introducing a new merchant-focused Merchant Payments Boot Camp with the first session scheduled March 21-22 in the San Francisco Bay Area. Nearly a thousand payments professionals have attended a Glenbrook Payments Boot Camp since they were introduced two years ago.   » Continue Reading

Purepay, a Columbus, Ohio-based acquirer and operator of payments companies, has announced its launch, planning to focus on automation and transaction processing within the financial services industry.   » Continue Reading

Comerica Bank has announced the "introduction of the Comerica WorldPerks Check Card and the Comerica WorldPerks Business Check Card -- a check card that lets individuals and businesses earn WorldPerks miles for their signature-based check card purchases." Both cards have annual fees.   » Continue Reading

Jeffrey Gangemi writes for Business Week about Microfinance International - MFIC - a "microfinance and remittance processing upstart" that provides "a remittance delivery platform that can be licensed to banks, new loan products for migrant workers in the U.S., larger loans to provide more lending capital to microfinance institutions in developing countries, and a burgeoning network of retail banking outlets in the U.S. geared toward serving the needs of low-income people."

Celent has published a new report titled "Up Close and Personal with Online Lending" that examines the state of online lending and what banks will need to do to obtain market share. “Perhaps the ultimate example of just how intensely personal online lending has become is peer-to-peer lending. Its customers often view their financial activity as a means of self expression. For these individuals, the personalization of online lending has increasingly meant the ability to choose who they borrow from, who they lend to, and what level of risk they should take in investing their money as their own lender. P2P lenders have demonstrated that a growing consumer lending market exists,” says Dan Schatt, co-author and senior analyst.

The Aite Group has published a new report titled "Converging Wire Transfer and Automated Clearing House (ACH) to Revolutionize U.S. Electronic Wholesale Payments" that concludes the US payments industry could save $7 billion annually if the two systems were converged into a single electronic system. According to Aite, "converging the wire transfer and ACH systems will provide optimum payments capabilities and services, significant cost savings, and revenue-generating opportunities."

MODASolutions has announced that TigerDirect, a retailer of computer hardware and components, is now accepting its SECURE-eBill payment option that allows customers to pay for purchases from their existing online bank accounts.   » Continue Reading

NACHA has announced that it accredited or re-accredited 668 payments industry professionals in 2006 under the Accredited ACH Professional (AAP) Program. The current number of AAPs nationwide is now at an all-time high of 3,036, and has increased by 85 percent since 1999.   » Continue Reading

No, it's not what you think. I had to smile as I read the press release announcing that "The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has announced plans to launch a new mobile banking service in Yorkshire, operating from York and running five days a week. The new mobile service will provide banking to around twenty Yorkshire communities and the service will start in February 2007." These are banks on wheels, not banks on your mobile phones.   » Continue Reading

People's Daily Online reports that China UnionPay "posted record card transactions of 12.31 billion yuan (1.54 billion U.S.dollars) on New Year's Day, up 70 percent from the same 2005 period."

Brian O'Conner writes for the Detroit News about a recent change by local utility DTE Energy who began "reporting the payment histories of all 2.5 million customers to the major credit bureaus in August." The impact on consumers missing a bill payment due date has been significant - O'Conner cites an example of one consumer whose "late DTE payment knocked his all-important credit score down by 100 points -- and pushed the interest rate on his new mortgage up."

Dave Birch picks up the discussion about the question we asked a few weeks ago in our Creating Wealth from Payments Innovation post: why isn't there a Wal-Mart for payments? Dave blames regulation - and that's certainly a factor. Reminds me of the days when airline fares in this country were heavily regulated, preventing a Southwest from emerging. On the other hand, the most successful new entrant in payments in recent history - PayPal - navigated the regulatory waters (state money transmitter laws primarily) relatively easily. One could argue regulation wasn't much of a barrier for their entry. Google Checkout - acting not like PayPal as a money transmitter but, rather, as a master merchant - seems to have avoided any financial regulatory issues. On the other hand, mobile payment provider Obopay's job description for a VP Treasury Operations includes being responsible for "compliance with Federal banking regulations such as Anti Money Laundering, Patriot Act, Regulation D and E, and the FFIEC guidelines" and for "state money transmitter regulations".

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