Visa Inc. and Visa Canada have announced the appointment of Tim Wilson as Head of Visa Canada effective May 30, 2008. Wilson will be replacing Derek Fry, who recently announced his retirement after 12 years as the President of Visa Canada.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke spoke earlier today about how the recent turmoil in financial markets came about and how the recent recommendations by the Treasury Department should help to address the root causes. In a very readable summary of the situation, Bernanke writes: 'Although many factors played a role, to a considerable extent the current problems arose in the implementation of the so-called originate-to-distribute approach to credit extension. The originate-to-distribute model breaks down the process of credit extension, from origination to the ultimate financing, into component parts, or stages, in a manner reminiscent of how contemporary manufacturers distribute the stages of production across firms and locations. This approach has had considerable benefits, including increased access of small and medium-sized borrowers to the broader capital markets, but pitfalls in its implementation are now evident.'

Michael Barrett, PayPal's Chief Information Security Officer, blogs about the progress PayPal has made in dealing with phishing attacks - and shares a paper titled 'A Practical Approach to Managing Phishing' that Michael wrote with his colleague Dan Levy and presented today at the RSA Conference in San Francisco. The secret? There's no one 'silver bullet' - but a multi-layered strategy has made a significant difference for PayPal.

The National Association of Convenience Stores reports that convenience store industry sales reached a new high of $577.4 billion in 2007 (up 1.4 percent), but that profits dropped by $1.4 billion, 'largely because of higher credit card fees.' In its press release, NACS goes on to say that "the net effect is that the industry's credit card fees are now more than double the industry's pretax profits."

The US Government Accountability Office has published a report titled "Governmentwide Purchase Cards - Actions Needed to Strengthen Internal Controls to Reduce Fraudulent, Improper, and Abusive Purchases" concluding that 'internal control weaknesses in agency purchase card programs exposed the federal government to fraud, waste, abuse, and loss of assets. When testing internal controls, GAO asked agencies to provide documentation on selected transactions to prove that the purchase of goods or services had been properly authorized and that when the good or service was delivered, an individual other than the cardholder received and signed for it. Using a statistical sample of purchase card transactions from July 1, 2005, through June 30, 2006, GAO estimated that nearly 41 percent of the transactions failed to meet either of these basic internal control standards.'

During March, a good friend of mine, John Chaplin, conducted a survey of global payments 'experts' (myself included) on the question of innovation in payments. Chris Skinner, another of the participating experts, does a great job outlining the findings from John's survey in this blog post. If you'd like a copy of the survey findings, email me or Chris and we'll be happy to send along a copy.

Brian Krebs writes for his Security Fix blog at the Washington Post about changes to the banking code in the UK that stress that online banking customers have the responsibility to keep up-to-date anti-virus, anti-spyware, etc. software installed on their computers - and wonders why more US banks don't make available hardware tokens to secure online access (the way PayPal optionally does).

I've had this general sense of late that everything seems like it's just slowing down - and today's news cycle seems to illustrate that. There's almost no interesting payments-related news today worth reporting. Just things like retail sales disappointed again in March (been to a store lately)? Hope you're not trying to get home on American. We'll keep our eyes out for anything worth reporting but, in the meantime, If the weather's decent in your area you might want to just take the afternoon off!

• New Mercator Advisory Group Reports : Online Collections Solutions: Morphing to Intelligent Interactive Cardholder Servicing, Forget Older Baby Boomers: Younger Boomers Should Be the Focus of Aggressive Bank Marketing
• Family Dollar Opts for VeriFone's MX830 and VeriShield Protect
• Global Payments Introduces Advanced, Flexible Processing Solution
• BB&T joins supply chain management forum
• WSJ: Habit-Forming: Borrowers Keep Piling On Debt
• S1 Corporate Banking's New Enhanced ACH Solution Launched by Major Financial Institution
• NCR ''Taste for Tech'' Survey Shows Consumers Appreciate Self-Service Banking and Are Frustrated When It's Not Available
• Bank of America Launches Innovative Approach to Managing Health Care