Currency Marketing's blog has a post today with an edited podcast of a recent keynote speech by ING Direct USA CEO Arkadi Kuhlman to the CUES Experience conference held in mid-May. Kuhlman's speech begins about 10 minutes into the podcast. Highly recommended listening!

As a reminder, there's a great Harvard Business School case on ING Direct written by James L. Heskett that's well worth reading. See this earlier Payments News post for details.

Visa has announced "significant milestones in the adoption of Visa’s contactless technology feature, Visa payWave, demonstrating continued global momentum for the technology around the world. Visa payWave-enabled cards allow consumers to simply “wave and go” making every day transactions faster and more convenient." READ MORE »

Adam Levitin, associate professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, writes on the Credit Slips blog (where interchange fees are this week's topic) about Visa's changes to interchange fees for fuel transactions announced last week.

Also, Levitin's recent paper titled "Priceless? The Economic Costs of Credit Card Merchant Restraints" (to be published in the UCLA Law Review) is available online.

The GSMA has announced plans to release later this summer "a preliminary set of minimum requirements for handsets containing Near Field Communications (NFC) chipsets. Developed by mobile operators supporting the GSMA's Pay-Buy-Mobile initiative, the requirements will help handset manufacturers to develop NFC-enabled phones that are compatible with operators' planned mobile NFC services and quickly realise economies of scale. Forty-four mobile operators from across the world support the Pay-Buy-Mobile initiative." READ MORE »

The GSMA, the global trade body for the mobile industry, and the European Payments Council, which represents 8,000 banks in the European Union and EEA and Switzerland, have announced they will be working together "to accelerate the deployment of services that enable consumers to pay for goods and services in shops, restaurants and other locations using their mobile phones." READ MORE »

In April, the Reserve Bank of Australia released the preliminary conclusions of its 2007/08 review of the payments system reforms undertaken by its Payments System Board. Interested parties were invited to make written submissions by June 30th on these conclusions and the analysis underpinning them. The RBA has made those submissions available online.

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