Mobilians International has announced its entry into the U.S. - bringing with it what it describes as "a compelling new online payment method, already successful in Asia, that allows a consumer to buy items online and use the mobile phone and mobile account for quick, easy transactions with no credit cards required." The company expects to commence active payment transactions with online merchants in the first quarter of 2008.

HSBC Finance Corporation’s card and retail services business and Pathmark Stores have announced "an agreement to offer a multi-purpose rewards and payment card for supermarket customers. The new Pathmark Advantage Payment Card enhances the current Pathmark Advantage Club card by providing an easy and superior one-swipe payment process that also generates loyalty rewards." The card is linked to the consumer's checking account and functions as a PIN-debit card for purchases. The cards will also be accepted "at more than 200,000 merchant locations in the U.S. that participate in the Tempo Payment Network."

The Center for Financial Services Innovation has announced "the initiation of the first comprehensive, authoritative national segmentation study of the underbanked market. Citi, eFunds (now part of Fidelity National Information Services), H&R Block and MasterCard are together sponsoring the research. All are members of CFSI’s Innovators Roundtable, which brings together groundbreaking, nationally significant financial services companies to collaborate toward accelerating underbanked practice across the industry."

The GSM Association (GSMA), a global trade association representing over 700 GSM mobile phone operators, and Western Union have announced an agreement "to facilitate the development of cross-border mobile money transfer services."

Mercator Advisory Group has published a new report titled "Account-Level Processing: Taking a Swipe at Payment and Loyalty Convergence". "The report focuses on Account-Level Processing (ALP), alternately known as Account-Level Management (ALM), which has the potential to revolutionize the payments landscape by optimizing the value that inherently exists within the data created by card-based electronic payments, thereby fundamentally changing the way consumers and merchants transact, as well as the way the general card payment services industry functions."

Grant Buckler writes for The Globe and Mail about multi-factor authentication and online banking - reporting that "combining passwords with questions and/or web cookies is the most popular multi-factor authentication technique online."

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