Glenbrook's Allen Weinberg and Jim Salters are attending this week's Payments 2008 conference in Las Vegas. Here's Allen's first report from today's sessions commenting primarily about banks (or, rather non-banks) and innovation.

Michael Dahn posted on the PCI Blog - Compliance Demystified about the recent discussions about the industry cost of PCI compliance. Both he and Walt Conway make important points about the key question being "Why is the cost of compliance so high?" and suggest that mastering PCI compliance is as much about defining scope down through business process changes as anything else. Walt writes: "Who said you have to keep doing things the same way as before? PCI is a great opportunity to actually reduce the institution's risk not by protecting CHD and all personally identifiable information (PII), but by getting rid of it."

Maria Aspan reports for the American Banker (subs. reqd) that L.L. Bean has posted on its web site that it will be terminating its current relationship with Bank of America, issuer of the L.L. Bean Visa card, effective at the end of June. On its web site, the retailer says it will be providing information about a new L.L. Bean Visa card in the coming weeks.

NACHA has announced that more than 18 billion automated clearing house (ACH) payments were made in 2007, a 12.6 percent increase over 2006. READ MORE »

NACHA has announced its Top 50 lists of the largest originating and receiving financial institutions of automated clearing house (ACH) payments for 2007. Complete listings of NACHA's Top 50 lists are available on the NACHA web site. READ MORE »

JPMorgan has announced it has been ranked as the number-one financial institution in total automated clearing house (ACH) network transactions originated for 2007 by NACHA – The Electronic Payments Association. The bank has ranked first in ACH originations for a record 33 years in a row, since the inception of the network. JPMorgan saw its ACH transactions grow to nearly 4 billion in 2007, an increase of nearly 9 percent over the previous year. READ MORE »

Online Resources Corp. has announced the broad launch of an integrated expedited payments service, first piloted in 2007, that is now fully available through more than 500 bank and credit unions. The service enables consumer and small business end-users to make guaranteed same day payments, in return for a service fee paid to their bank or credit union. READ MORE »

WaMu has announced that it has passed the one million business checking account mark - reflecting double-digit growth in business checking, year over year. READ MORE »

Experian has announced the launch of Account Monitoring Service, a business credit monitoring system that provides relevant and actionable alerts, enabling clients to minimize risk and maximize customer relationships. According to the company, AMS includes "the industry's widest range of credit-based alerts to inform clients of significant positive and negative events in their customers' credit profiles, allowing them to avoid risk or signal up-sell or cross-sell opportunities." READ MORE »

Last wee, Amazon.com announced a new Amazon Flexible Payments Service Marketplace Widget that provides developers the ability to create a widget for moving money between two other parties, with complete control of fees paid to the developer. Money moves from buyer to seller, and the seller pays a fee to the developer. The fee can be a fixed amount and/or a percentage of the transaction. Amazon also added several other features to FPS including instant payment notification and new transaction details including providing the buyer's email address to the seller.

Apple Vacations has announced that it will add the Secure Vault Payments (SVP) as an additional payment option for online customers. The Automated Clearing House (ACH)-based Internet payments network allows consumers to conduct e-commerce and bill payment transactions without sharing personal account information. SVP will be available to Apple Vacations' customers this summer. READ MORE »

The European Payments Consultant Association (EPCA) conducted their 7th annual conference ("Releasing the power of payments – same game, new rules") in early April this year. The conference summary is available online here .

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