Amazon's Web Services has introduced a new "Pay Now" widget "to make things very easy for web developers who would like to accept Amazon Payments on their site." More info available in the FAQ.

The 2007 Federal Reserve Payments Study released today concludes that "in 2006 more than two-thirds of all U.S noncash payments were made electronically. From 2003 to 2006, the period covered by the study, all types of electronic payments grew while check payments decreased. The Federal Reserve’s 2004 Payments Study found that the number of electronic payments and check payments were roughly equal in 2003."

Guardian Analytics has announced the release of FraudMAP, a fraud prevention solution for protecting online accounts from fraud and identity theft. According to the company, "FraudMAP delivers fraud detection, forensics and ongoing risk monitoring based on strong analytics and rich, predictive models of individual behavior. The unique solution was built from the ground up to automatically detect new online fraud threats without requiring fraud rules development or algorithm training."

comScore has released an update of its report on holiday season e-commerce spending for the first 37 days (November 1 - December 7) of the November - December 2007 holiday season - reporting that more than $18 billion has been spent online during the season-to-date, marking an 18-percent gain versus the corresponding days last year. Thursday, December 6 recorded $803 million in online sales, up 28 percent versus year ago, making it the heaviest online spending day in history.

MasterCard Worldwide has announced "the issuance of the 20 millionth MasterCard PayPass device globally."

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