The PayPal Blog notes that JP Morgan has recently published an "in-depth analysis on the PayPal business".

The Smart Payment Association (SPA), a group of the industry's largest manufacturers of payment smart cards, has announced findings from its 2008 market monitoring activity - undertaken in order to get a better understanding of the current status of the payment smart card market and its key trends.

"A lot of industries were severely affected by the financial crisis. Despite a slowdown in the SPA payment smart card shipments at the end of 2008, the smart card manufacturers are not as heavily impacted as others can be", said Marie-Jane Denis, President of the Smart Payment Association. "High volumes continue to be shipped around the world and a majority of regions carry on their migration to EMV standards." READ MORE

Heartland Payment Systems has announced that yesterday it successfully completed the first phase of its end-to-end encryption pilot project. According to the company, "this first step involved the transmission of live AES (Advanced Encryption Standard)-encrypted card transactions from a merchant to Heartland’s processing platform. AES is the highest level of encryption and is currently on track to replace DES (Data Encryption Standard) and Triple DES as the desired standard for sensitive data."

Earlier this month Heartland announced it was working with Voltage Security to develop its end-to-end encryption approach. READ MORE

Visa has announced that it has entered into a strategic alliance with Monitise plc "to facilitate the delivery of Visa mobile payments and related services to consumers around the world. Concurrent with the strategic alliance, Visa has agreed to make a minority equity investment in Monitise, subject to Monitise shareholder approval."

The Wall St. Journal is reporting that "Monitise said Visa has agreed to take a 14.4% stake" for $13 million. READ MORE

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