In today's Wall St. Journal, former president Bill Clinton and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger have an op-ed piece titled "Beyond Payday Loans" - where they write about efforts they're backing to help reduce the $8 billion spent on check cashing services, payday loans, etc. They write: "Here is one initiative that can unite progressives and conservatives as well as business leaders and community activists: helping the "unbanked" enter the financial mainstream by opening checking and savings accounts, and working collaboratively with financial institutions and community groups to develop and market products that work for this untapped market."

TechCrunch's Mark Hendrickson writes about Noca, a Redwood City, CA-based startup that "is attempting to virtually eliminate transaction fees by bypassing the credit card companies altogether with its own online payment service." Noca's mission statement says it is "building a new online payment system to provide significantly reduced transaction processing rates for online shopping enabling efficient processing of micro-transactions for digital goods."

IBC Bank, a member of International Bancshares Corporation, and Visa Inc. have announced signing a five-year partnership agreement that will result in IBC converting its entire debit portfolio of 450,000 debit cards in the United States to Visa-branded products as well as using the Visa Debit Processing Service (DPS) for debit card processing.

Visa Inc. has announced that "as of the end of 2007, more than three-fourths of the largest U.S. merchants (those processing six million or more Visa transactions annually) and nearly two-thirds of medium-sized merchants (those processing between one million and six million Visa transactions annually) have now validated their compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Merchants in these two categories account for approximately two-thirds of Visa's U.S. transaction volume."

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