According to a press release from Acxsys and NYCE, during the four month period from December through March 2008, Canadian shoppers spent record amounts and made significantly more cross-border purchases in the US than last year. READ MORE

First Data posted a press release this afternoon saying that it is now "directly offering a solution to address merchant needs" in Austria. The company sais its 'FirstPOS' offers merchants a comprehensive package for accepting payment cards. READ MORE

Al Hammond blogs on the NextBillion.net blog of the World Resources Institute about comments made at the recent Cairo conference on mobile banking and, in particular, the experience of M-PESA in Kenya. "The dominant use of M-PESA by Kibera residents is to transfer money home to their native rural villages, underscoring the importance of internal remittances in virtually all developing countries. ... M-PESA is competing successfully with more traditional means of remittances. Many users say the service is faster, safer-less chance of theft or "lost" money-and could be sent directly to their home village."

Universal Air Travel Plan (UATP) has announced an alliance with Stored Value Solutions (SVS) that focuses on supplying gift cards to the global commercial airline community. READ MORE

At its investment community meeting earlier today, MasterCard said it is now "targeting annual net income growth of 20% to 30%, revenue growth of 12% to 15% and a three- to five-percentage point increase in operating margin" according to a story in the Wall St. Journal by Kevin Kingsbury.

Citi has announced it is offering its cardholders "an exciting, new benefit on participating credit cards called Extra Cash from Citi that allows customers to earn discounts on some of the biggest and most popular names in travel, entertainment and merchandise -- just for using their card." READ MORE

James Gardner, head of Innovation and Research at Lloyds TSB in London, blogs about a new book he's writing titled "Innovation and the Future Proof Bank". He says "the end result will be a book that senior managers can use to help them establish an innovation function."

Gardner is looking for input from active practitioners - specifically "case studies around innovation processes, specific results of that process, people and leadership, governance or anything else that might be useful guidance to anyone starting their innovation journey." He's also looking for stories of things that went wrong. I'm sure he'd welcome hearing from you. Contact him via email - at the address listed at the bottom of his post. (Yesterday, I was reading a great new book about Pixar - and loved this quote from Joseph Schumpeter: "Successful innovation is a feat not of intellect, but of will." Oh so true!)

In a blog post titled "5 ways to prepare today for the risk of lower interchange revenue tomorrow", Aneace Haddad lists what he thinks card issuers in the US and Europe should be thinking about if they're evaluating the scenario that interchange fees could be reduced.

The U.S. Postal Service has selected U.S. Bank to provide purchasing cards and Voyager fleet cards under the new General Services Administration (GSA) SmartPay2 contract. READ MORE

In a post titled "Attacks on NFC mobile phones demonstrated", Dancho Danchev writes for ZDNet on last week's presentation by Collin Mulliner at the EUSecWest conferece in London.

This morning MasterCard is holding an investment community meeting. A copy of the presentation slides is available.

Visa has announced an expansion of its fraud recovery process to include Plus and Interlink ATM network transactions to better help financial institutions recoup counterfeit fraud losses. The extension becomes effective November 1, 2008. READ MORE

• First French Co-Branded Visa Card with a Mobile Operator
• IMS Research: 900M Users for Mobile Banking & Payment Services in 2012
• ABC News: Deck Stacked in Credit Card Disputes?
• San Jose Mercury News: Arco debit-card scams in San Jose, Los Altos linked to statewide ring
• Coremetrics Increases Share of World's Top Retailers
• H&R Block Adds Mobile Phone Banking to Emerald Card Platform
• Payment Data Systems Creates New Subsidiary for Stored Value Card Issuing
• H&R Block banks on mobile for customer loyalty

We have received news of the following recent management changes:

• Floris de Kort has been named Chief Commercial Officer at GlobalCollect. Mr. de Kort joined the Management Team of GlobalCollect in 2003 as Vice President Global Business Development.