The Mercator Advisory Group has announced a new report titled "US Mobile Banking: Sedate Growth, Disruptive Potential". According to Mercator, "mobile banking will be a disruptive force for smart FIs willing to tailor their message to specific demographics. Otherwise, mobile banking is in danger of becoming "yet another" convenience feature leaving the broad flank of the FI community exposed to more nimble players wielding mobile-enabled alternatives. A mobile-enabled decoupled platform is just one possibility." READ MORE

The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago has announced the release of a Chicago Fed Letter titled "Assessing the landscape of payments fraud" by Katy Jacob and Bruce Summers. "This Fed Letter provides a broad overview of the issue of payments fraud and of various perspectives on how to effectively deal with the problem."

The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago will host its eighth annual payments conference on June 5-6, 2008. The conference will highlight threats to the security of the payments system and explore solutions to those challenges. This article previews issues that will be covered at the conference.

Calling it "The Search That Pays You Back", Microsoft later this morning is introducing a new cashback awards feature on its Live Search web site. READ MORE

First Data Corp. has announced that it has signed an agreement with EUFISERV and its fifteen shareholders (including twelve European banks and banking organizations) to expand and develop the European inter-bank processing network managed by EUFISERV. The two companies said that "connecting the existing networks of EUFISERV and First Data will create the opportunity for customers to access more than 74,000 ATMs, 1.5 million POS merchants and to reach more than 165 million debit and credit card accounts in Europe." READ MORE

• India's Economic Times: ABN Amro, PayMate tie up for mobile payments
• Sybase 365 to Deliver Mobile Banking Services to Compass Bank
• PaySimple Survey Finds Major Trend of US Small Businesses Looking to Adopt Electronic Payments, Consumers Driving the Trend
• Open Solutions Canada Selects Hypercom’s HBNet for One of Canada’s Largest Off-Premise ATM and POS Networks
• Advantidge Offers New Eco-Friendly ID Cards as Plastic Alternative
• Sterling Savings Bank Consolidates Online Business Banking with ACI Worldwide
• ACI Money Transfer System Earns Eleventh Consecutive SWIFTReady Gold Accreditation
• INSIDE Contactless Continues Expansion in Canadian Smart Card Market
• AuctionBytes: Australia to Rule on eBay's PayPal-Only Policy in Mid-June
• Philadelphia Inquirer: Credit card fees further strain gas stations
• London Times: Shops track customers via mobile phone - Signals given off by phones allow shopping centres to monitor how long people stay and which stores they visit
• Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You Should Too
• Americans Spend More Than 4.5 Hours per Month Browsing on Smartphones, Nearly Double the Rate of the British

We have received news of the following recent management changes:

• Guilherme Blumenthal has been named Chief Operations Officer and Chief Payments Risk Officer at Visanet Brazil. Previously, Guilherme was EVP Global Sales and Operations at Hypercom Corporation.