This particular post is mostly for the Web 2.0 payments geeks among us.

Some of you have noticed that a couple of months ago we started posting our updates to Payments News not just to this site - but also as brief snippet updates send out via Twitter. Twitter became a new way you could follow the news here - we think that, if you're an active Twitter user, you'll naturally want to sign up to follow PN there. A couple of hundred folks have already done so.

Up until we added our Twitter feed, you could tune into Payments News by just periodically checking the web site, by subscribing to our daily email distribution (if you only want a dose of PN once a day every morning - but then you're also always going to be at least a day behind!) or by monitoring the PN RSS feed in semi-real time using an RSS reader (by the way, we LOVE and highly recommend Google Reader for reading RSS feeds!).

Now, if you choose to follow PaymentsNews on Twitter, you'll see our posts almost as soon as they're published - as we're using Twitterfeed to pull our RSS feed into Twitter automatically - and push them out to your Twitter account. So, if you're already on Twitter, be sure to follow PaymentsNews. If you're new to Twitter and want to try it, you can sign up here.

If you're looking for some advice as to how all this works, take a look at Wednesday's Wall St. Journal Mossberg Solutions column titled "Birds of a Feather Twitter Together" by Katherine Boehret. Or, read Tim O'Reilly's post "Why I Love Twitter". For more tips on using Twitter, see Darren Rowse's new TwiTip blog. Or, read Guy Kawasaki's "How I Use Twitter as a Twool". Twitter is going mainstream - fast.

And, if you want to follow your Payments News editor's personal Twitter feed, you can do so by following SJL My personal tweets are much more about what I'm working on, exploring, learning, questioning, etc. and definitely not about news of the day!

Questions/comments? Click on the Feedback tab in the title bar up top on this page and send us an email! If you're active on Twitter and want us to share your feed with others here on PN (like the other payments and banking blogs we share), send us your Twitter ID and we'll add you to a new page we'll be building soon of like-minded, Twitter-oriented payments professionals!

And, if you're looking for help thinking through the implications of all this Twitter stuff for your business, we can help you with that as well. READ MORE »

TSYS has announced that an agreement with JPMorgan Chase with respect to the discontinuation of the servicing of Washington Mutual Bank's (WaMu's) consumer card portfolio by TSYS. Chase will pay TSYS fees for deconversion and termination which both parties have agreed not to disclose. The deconversion is expected to take place in March 2009 after which Chase will process the WaMu portfolio in house on the technology platform it licenses from TSYS. READ MORE »

Chase Paymentech's Pulse Index reports that yesterday's Cyber Monday 2008 sales volume increased less than half a percent from last year, but transaction count was ahead of 2007 by 14.5 percent. This resulted in the average ticket size, or average dollar spent per transaction, decreasing 12 percent below last year.

"Cyber Monday was very interesting," said Aaron Press, Director of Market Analysis for Chase Paymentech. "Transaction volume was well ahead of last year for that day, but sales growth was meager. For the entire holiday season, the slower rise in sales volume compared to the steeper increase in transactions has resulted in the average ticket being lower on most days."

The FDIC has released "FDIC Study of Bank Overdraft Programs" containing results from a two-part study "to gather empirical data on the types, characteristics, and use of overdraft programs operated by FDIC-supervised banks. The study was undertaken in response to the recent rapid growth in the use of automated overdraft programs, defined as programs in which the bank honors a customer's overdraft obligations using standardized procedures to determine whether the nonsufficient fund (NSF) transaction qualifies for overdraft coverage. Little empirical data have been available on these programs, their features, their managing practices, the fees imposed, and consumer usage patterns." READ MORE »

Visa Inc. and Yalamanchili Software Exports (P) Limited have announced that they have formed a joint venture that they say "will allow Visa to extend its industry-leading processing capabilities in some of the fastest-growing payments regions in the world. Visa will have a controlling interest in the joint venture, named Visa Processing Service Pte. Ltd. (VPS). It begins operations this week and will serve existing processing clients." A new website at www.visaprocessingservice.com provides more information. READ MORE »

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