Dave Birch blogs about the business case for mobile payments - partially in reaction to a paper by Deloitte titled "Reversing the Charges" .

MasterCard has announced the launch of MasterCard smartdata.gen2 - describing it as "a proprietary, web-based expense and information management solution that provides businesses with integrated, global expense spending analysis and multiple robust reporting options so they can better manage their expenditures."

Chase Paymentech has updated its Pulse Index - reporting that, building from a strong base established during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, online retailers continue to see growth in both the number of transactions and sales volume.

The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs is holding a hearing this morning titled "Credit Card Practices: Unfair Interest Rate Increases". "The Subcommittee hearing will examine the circumstances under which credit card issuers may increase the interest rates of cardholders who are in compliance with the terms of their credit cards." Copies of the witnesses' testimony is available online.

Zopa has launched what it says is "an online community that offers unprecedented benefits to borrowers and investors, by offering safe, market rate Zopa CDs to individual investors that are linked to lowering the payments of an individual borrower’s unsecured personal loans."

Discover Financial Services has announced the launch of a new eGift Card, a prepaid, stored value card that can be used for purchases online or over the phone at merchant locations that accept Discover Card.

PayPal has introduced a new Storefront Widget in beta that "allows casual sellers to embed a virtual storefront into your blog, website, social networking profile page, or just about anywhere that accepts HTML code." Judy Chang writes more about it on the PayPal Blog and Duncan Riley reports on TechCrunch.

In an article titled 'A credit-card alternative', Tricia Bishop reports for the Baltimore Sun about Bill Me Later - "a young company is trying to change the way people shop online by providing a payment alternative to the credit card."

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