Star announced the results of a recent study finding that consumers are indicating a growing desire to make small payments by debit card.

The survey of 11,263 consumers, the largest in the electronic payments industry, also found that consumers who make both PIN-secured and signature debit purchases are the most active among all debit cardholders in terms of number of transactions. Respondents who used only signature debit used their card an average of 13 times per month, while those who used only PIN-secured debit used their card almost 9 times (8.9) per month. But usage frequency jumped to almost 19 times (18.8) per month among those who made both types of transactions.

Lynda Richardson profiles anti-trust lawyer Lloyd Constantine in this morning's New York Times. Constantine was the lead attorney on the recently settled merchant lawsuit against MasterCard and Visa USA.

He says this recent case will reshape an industry in which the two companies used their dominance in the credit card market to exact excessive fees from merchants when customers used their debit cards. He calls them "the cartel of Visa and MasterCard." "We believe people do better when things are free," he says. "The regime we're ending is a system where there were no choices." He also expects the settlements to cut the fees that merchants usually pay each time they accept Visa- or MasterCard-branded debit cards, saving merchants and consumers as much as $100 billion over the next 10 years. "To me, that's 100 times more important than $3 billion," he says.

The Register reports on the start of trials in Northhampton in the UK using smart cards with consumer PIN verification technology designed to reduce card fraud. More information about the initiative is available at the Chip and PIN website created by the card industry in the UK to provide consumer and merchant information about the program.

MasterCard reports on the results of a recent survey of consumers which indicates that enhanced security features are important to increasing consumer online shopping.

Assurance that personal information would be kept private, a guarantee that consumers would not receive unwanted e-mails as a result of purchases and an extra layer of security for credit card transactions were among the most important factors influencing the degree to which consumers would make purchases online. More than 1,000 consumers participated in the study, "MasterCard Internet Consumer Segmentation Research," which was conducted during fourth quarter 2002.