The Direct Response Forum (DRF), a trade association for payments professionals in the direct response industry, has announced it will hold its annual forum on Monday August 10th through Wednesday August 12th, 2009 at the Tampa Marriott Waterside Hotel.

This year’s forum, Celebrating 20 Years of Educating Merchants on Payment Processing Profitability, will provide a variety of educational sessions designed to give card-not-present merchants real-time strategies for streamlining payment processes and cutting costs. READ MORE »

Last week, the Federal Reserve released its latest triennial summary of the Survey of Consumer Finances . As Paul Krugman noted in his column in the New York Times this morning, "there has been basically no wealth creation at all since the turn of the millennium: the net worth of the average American household, adjusted for inflation, is lower now than it was in 2001."

Here's how the Fed put it in the introduction to this update of the SCF:

The survey shows that, over the 2004–07 period, the median value of real (inflation-adjusted) family in- come before taxes was little changed; median income had grown slightly in the preceding three-year period.

Noting that the SCF has typically underreported credit card debt, Adam Levitin writes on the Credit Slips blog:

Balances for revolvers grew by somewhere between a quarter and a third in three years. Wow. This bespeaks a rapid leveraging up in credit card debt for a large segement of Americans.

ViVOtech has announced that it has closed an $8.6m extension to its Series C round of funding from its existing investors, bringing the total investment in its series C round to more than $40m. Separately, the company also announced that it has been awarded a key NFC-related software patent by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Patent number 7,469,151 was awarded on December 23rd 2008 and covers" a broad range of methods, systems and products for over the air (OTA) provisioning of credit, debit, prepaid, loyalty and other payment or non-payment cards into mobile phone devices through wireless networks or the internet." READ MORE »

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