RBC Royal Bank of Canada, Visa and Rogers Wireless have announced they are partnering for the next phase of a mobile phone payment pilot that will allow Canadians to make purchases securely at the point of sale with a wave of their mobile phone. The customer phase of the mobile phone payment pilot is expected to launch in mid-2009, following a brief employee pilot.

PayPal has announced special offers for online shoppers this holiday season. "Customers can receive up to 20 percent cash back on purchases from major retailers, such as American Eagle Outfitters, eToys and Blockbuster, as well as free shipping from select PayPal merchants and great eBay deals for anyone paying with PayPal." READ MORE

Reminder: Join us Wednesday, November 12th in Mountain View, California for a one day, Advanced Workshop on Emerging Payments taught by Jay DeWitt, Russ Jones, and Allen Weinberg from Glenbrook Partners.

At this workshop, we'll be talking about the potential impacts of the current financial market crisis on the payments industry, as well as diving deep into topics such as PayPal's acquisition of Bill Me Later, and the learnings from several recent NFC trials for mobile payments.

Registration is now available online. Questions? Contact Carol Coye Benson via email at bootcamp@glenbrook.com.

ID Analytics has announced an enhanced version of ID Score that "leverages critical online identity elements to further reduce identity fraud within the online environment, while also significantly improving the customer experience." READ MORE

MasterCard has announced the launch of a MasterCard Over-the-Air Provisioning Service, calling it "the first program of its kind that enables issuers to perform over-the-air personalization of their cardholders' mobile devices in an easy, one-step process. The service allows issuers to implement PayPass on mobile programs in a reduced timeframe with minimal development and implementation effort. Mobile MasterCard PayPass enables mobile devices to perform payment transactions at merchant locations with PayPass-enabled point-of-sale terminals." READ MORE

Mobile Money Ventures, a joint venture of Citi and SK Telecom, has announced that it is providing Citibank Hong Kong with a service platform that supports mobile banking and mobile stock trading. Additionally, MMV has customized features for iPhone 3G users including providing a mobile stock trading application. READ MORE

In an article titled "The Steady Ascent of the Debit Card", Christopher Palmeri writes for Business Week about the increasing use by consumers of debit cards and what banks are doing to boost their profits from debit card usage - particularly with overdraft fees.

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