Matt Hines reports for InfoWorld on a briefing being put on by Visa tomorrow in Washington, DC titled "Maintaining Trust in Payments Summit".

Bank of America has announced Emergency Relief Cards - what the bank calls "a suite of prepaid card products that will assist corporations and government entities to prepare for catastrophic events. The special-use cards are
designed to be incorporated into contingency plans to enable continuing business operations and to provide relief measures during times of critical need."

Washington Mutual (WaMu) has joined NACHA as a direct financial institution member. According to the most recent NACHA Top 50 list, WaMu is the nation's fifth largest receiving financial institution of ACH payments.

Zopa, the UK-based person-to-person lending marketplace, is celebrating its second birthday. An article in Easier Finance reports on Zopa's progress to date - more than 135,000 members have joined Zopa and, perhaps most significantly, very few Zopa members have failed to pay back their loans – Zopa’s default rate is 0.2%. More birthday celebration on the Zopa blog.

The Innovate blog written by two students at Stanford's business and design schools has posted a podcast interview of Chris Larsen, CEO of person-to-person lending company Prosper.com. "In this podcast, Chris chats with Julio and Min Li about Prosper's innovative vision, its unique challenges as an eBay platform for money (check out Prosper's cool tools for academics and researchers for performing case studies on its model), and the fine balance between the countervailing forces of transparency and privacy in the world of Web 2.0."

Naushad Contractor writes for Thinking Aloud! about the needs he sees for payment systems to support ecommerce in India. He says "Most of the eCommerce in India is currently conducted using credit cards. However, while the Internet has penetrated rapidly into semi-urban and rural areas, credit card penetration has not quite kept pace, further accentuating the need for an all pervasive, easily available ePayment service."

ID Analytics has introduced Breach Analysis Services for enterprises - "the only solution on the market that can determine with a high degree of accuracy whether a data breach is truly a source of identity theft or related harm" according to the company.

Laura Bruce writes for Bankrate.com about paperless checking accounts - among them ING DIRECT's Electric Orange checking account - soon to be generally available

The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs is holding a hearing today titled "Credit Card Practices: Fees, Interest Rates, and Grace Periods."

Speaking from the industry will be Bruce Hammonds , President, Bank of America Card Services; Richard Srednicki, Chief Executive Officer, Chase Bank USA, N.A.; and Vikram Atal, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, Citi Cards.

According to an article by Kathleen Day of the Washington Post, the CEO of Chase Card Services "will apologize to Congress today for charging a financially strapped customer $7,500 in interest charges and late fees on purchases of $3,200, the company said yesterday."

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