Mercator Advisory Group has announced a new report titled "Decoupled Debit - Let's Take a Closer Look" that the company says "evaluates the recent emergence of this new and possibly disruptive technology in the financial services industry, decoupled debit. Decoupled debit is an alternative based ACH debit card solution that utilizes two existing systems that are well defined in the financial services industry but were not designed to work in combination with each other, the ACH network and the branded payment networks such as MasterCard, Visa, NYCE, etc."

Comdata Stored Value Solutions has announced the results of its fifth annual survey of gift card purchases showing that "the availability of gift card malls and expanded uses for gift cards are making them even more popular and versatile."

Shopping.com has announced it has "signed deals with some of the nation’s top retailers to offer their gift cards online this season, all from one convenient place. Shoppers will be able to easily compare brand name cards in various increments for everyone on their holiday list."

BSG Clearing Solutions has announced a new mobile phone payment solution called Bill2Phone-Mobile that enables multimedia merchants to deliver digital content to mobile phones and bill those content charges to subscribers’ mobile phone bills.

Mercator Advisory Group has announced a new report titled "Small Business Credit Card 2007 Update: Competition for Segments Intensifies" that examines recent developments in the highly competitive small business credit card marketplace.

In an article titled 'The $915B bomb in consumers' wallets', Peter Gumbel writes for Fortune about increasing concerns that credit-strapped consumers may accelerate the delinquency rates for US credit card issuers. He suggests looking at the experience in the UK - saying it's about 18 months ahead of the US in the current credit cycle. He notes that "credit card delinquencies and charge-off rates in Britain have risen as much as 50%".

In an article titled 'Barclays becomes major credit card player', Leslie A. Poppas writes for the Wilmington News Journal about Barclay's US credit card business. "While employment at other credit card issuers in the area has decreased, employment at Barclays has tripled since the London bank bought Juniper for $293 million in December 2004. This month, Barclays hired its 1,000th Delaware employee and now employs 1,012 people in the state..."

Akamai Technologies has introduced what the company is calling "the industry’s first and only PCI-compliant site acceleration service. PCI-compliant site and transaction acceleration will provide companies conducting ecommerce online with the assurance that sensitive credit card information is transmitted over a platform that is PCI-compliant."

Juniper Research has announced a new report titled "Mobile Payments: Strategies & Markets, 2007-2011". The report provides "detailed market sizing, forecasts until 2011, player analysis and positioning strategies."

Metavante has announced the availability of its Healthcare Gateway - calling it "a single online portal through which most eligibility inquiries, claims submissions and status checks, and payments activities can flow and be monitored on-demand electronically."

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