Andrew Kramer reports for the New York Times about a Russian hacker attack on Sweden's Nordea Bank's customers via a virus distributed via email. According to the report, "thieves using the program in Sweden defrauded 250 customers of Nordea’s online banking service over a period of 15 months."

Are you a payments professional looking for a new position? Or, are you an employer (or a recruiter) looking to hire a payments professional? Be sure to check out the new (beta!) PaymentsJobs.com website - in partnership with SimplyHired.com. Employers and recruiters can post jobs for payments professionals here.

The Google Operating System blog notes the new, larger Google Checkout buttons now being tested - much bigger than the original little green shopping cart icon in participating merchant ads.

Mercator Advisory Group has announced an update on anti-money laundering (AML) activity titled "Moving Toward The 'Total Mix'." According to Mercator, this report examines the growing FI-wide approach to AML as well as trends in compliance enforcement, suspicious activity reporting for 2006 and AML vendor consolidation. The report focuses in particular on the markets for and vendors of AML technologies addressing the small and
mid-market banking segments.

eBay, PayPal's parent, reported fourth quarter 2006 financial results today. PayPal's revenue for the quarter grew to $417 million, up 37% year over year and its number of user accounts grew to a total of 133 million, up 38 percent.

The Massachusetts Bankers Association said today that "several banks across the Bay State have reported incidents of fraud due to the recently disclosed data breach by the TJX Companies. The fraudulent use of debit and credit card data has thus far been used to make purchases in Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana in the U.S., and Hong Kong and Sweden overseas."

Vivian Wai-Yin Kwok reports for Forbes on Visa International's partnership with the Bank of China for the 2008 Olympics to be held in Beijing.

30 Second Software has announced “Digby" - describing it as "an electronic commerce service that radically simplifies the buying experience by combining rich content from name-brand retailers with an intuitive shopping process that is optimized for mobile devices."

Donald P. Morgan of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has published a staff report titled "Defining and Detecting Predatory Lending" (PDF). From the abstract: "We find that in states with higher payday loan limits, less educated households and households with uncertain income are less likely to be denied credit, but are not more likely to miss a debt payment. Absent higher delinquency, the extra credit from payday lenders does not fit our definition of predatory. Nevertheless, it is expensive."

Robert Schroeder reports for MarketWatch that the US Senate Banking Committee is planning to hold a hearing this Thursday titled “Examining the Billing, Marketing, and Disclosure Practices of the Credit Card Industry, and Their Impact on Consumers.”

Dave Friedlos of Computing provides some background on the recently announced Oyster-enabled Barclaycard.

ClickandBuy has announced it will "offer its full and comprehensive suite of services to BitPass merchants. ClickandBuy’s payment platform provides all different types of payments – not only micropayments, but more lucrative payments – payments such as monthly subscriptions, yearly fees and other payment structures, that can help merchants make more money online." Last week Bitpass announced it was ceasing operations.

National City Global Treasury Management has announced "Corporate Remote Capture, an e-commerce solution with robust capabilities that provides the bank's business clients with a convenient, electronic way to manage check collections at their location and eliminate branch visits to make deposits."

Gemalto has announced that its personalization center outside of Toronto, Ontario, Canada is the first to achieve smart banking card certification from Interac, Canada’s debit and Automated Banking Machine (ABM) network.

According to an NRF survey, conducted by BIGresearch, consumers have plenty left to spend on gift cards purchased for the last holiday season: shoppers said they had spent less than half of the value of their gift cards (37.3% on average) by the second week in January.

The Mercator Advisory Group has published a new research report titled "Credit Card Fraud Update: Silos Versus The Balloon Effect" examining "the incidence of a range of card fraud types, such as issuer and online retailer fraud losses, as well as less well defined or publicized fraud activities."

• TSYS Acquiring Solutions Signs Processing Agreement with Clearent
• Information Week: Analyst: Banks Must Make Credit Card Accounts Useless To Data Thieves
• Ruesch International Works With PayPal to Provide Payment Tools for Small Businesses
• Harley-Davidson Financial Services Selects Metavante’s GHR Systems to Provide Web-Based Financing Solution for Motorcycle Loans
• Survey Says LifeLock Cuts Risk of Identity Theft in Half
• Diebold Selected by PNC Bank for Enhancements To ATM Network
• ACI Worldwide Responds to Smart Card Market Demand
• Boston Globe: Filling in gaps on the data breach
• Risk IDS Releases Industry's First Open Source Card Fraud Prevention System

We have received news of the following recent management changes:

• Per-Kristian (Kris) Halvorsen has been promoted to senior vice president and chief technology officer at Intuit.