The Smart Card Alliance Transportation Council has announced publication of a new white paper, "Serving Unbanked Consumers in the Transit Industry with Prepaid Cards” , that examines how transit agencies can serve "unbanked" or "underbanked" individuals, including both the traditional approach of establishing retail sales outlets for fare media and a potential new approach of using network-branded prepaid cards. READ MORE »

Mukul Singhal blogs about the Reserve Bank of India's recent issuance of draft guidelines for mobile banking and payments in India. He also links to a useful paper by Mahil Carr titled "Mobile Payment Systems and Services: An Introduction" .

NACHA has announced that Fidelity National Information Services (FIS) will offer NACHA’s Secure Vault Payments solution to its clients. FIS will offer Secure Vault Payments to current clients as well as financial institutions without an existing relationship with FIS. READ MORE »

The FDIC has issued a press release celebrating its 75th anniversary. "Deposit insurance has given consumers peace of mind that their insured money is safe. We at the FDIC are very proud to say that no depositor has ever lost a penny of insured funds at an FDIC-insured institution. As bank customers age and accumulate wealth in savings and retirement accounts, now more than ever, it's important for people to know their deposit insurance limits," Chairman Sheila C. Bair said today. READ MORE »

eBay has announced plans to allow third parties to integrate applications directly onto its ecommerce site. According to eBay, "this move will give developers unprecedented access to eBay’s community of professional sellers, creating more opportunities for developers to market their tools and giving sellers a wider variety of sales optimization applications." READ MORE »

Scanbuy, a mobile marketing solutions company, has announced the results of a consumer study finding "strong demand for 2D barcode technology among U.S. mobile Internet users. The survey, the first of its kind in the U.S., found that 83 percent of mobile Internet users are likely to use Scanbuy's 2D barcode platform ScanLife." READ MORE »

PayPal has announced a new Developer Central portal saying it is "designed to help developers support growing merchant demand for online payments." PayPal also introduced new application programming interfaces (APIs) to give merchants more flexibility to manage their customer transactions. READ MORE »

Dave Birch and Chris Skinner both write about payments fraud on their blogs. Chris reviews the presentations (available online) from the recent Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago conference on Payments Fraud and concludes that the fraudsters are smart and likely to always be one step ahead. Dave asks why the banks have "continued to bend, batter and patch up the credit card systems to force them into environments for which they were never designed."

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