Jane Kim reports for the Wall St. Journal on the issue of currency conversion fees for credit card transactions overseas.

Although there are advantages to using plastic because of the favorable wholesale rate on currency exchanges, in some cases it may make sense to use an automated teller machine and pay cash instead, says Robert McKinley, chief executive of CardWeb.com, a payment-card industry Web site.

Jonathan Stempel reports for Reuters that Visa USA and MasterCard have won dismissal of a lawsuit by California merchants alleging antitrust violations in setting payment transaction fees.

James McGrath of the Payments Card Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia has published a new paper looking at the impact of online bill payment on paper checks (PDF).   » Continue Reading

The Federal Reserve Board has launched a new online project with USA Today that teaches middle school and high school students about economics and personal finances by challenging them to construct a newspaper front page.

Students are provided with instructions and a template of the front page of The Fed Today. Over four weeks, they are expected to consult the Federal Reserve's recently redesigned education web site--FederalReserveEducation.org--for information needed to complete all of the elements of the page, including headlines, photos, captions, graphs and statistics.

The project helps teachers meet national and state academic content standards for high school economics and personal finance courses. It may be found at: http://www.usatoday.com/educate/federalreserve/index_new2.html

Eric Dash reports for the New York Times on what just might be the data theft capital of the US.

While the banks and payment processors have been targets in the largest and highest-profile attacks, security specialists say the payment system's most vulnerable points may be the estimated five million merchants where cards are accepted.

Unlike banks and other financial institutions, merchants often lack technological expertise and management attention to keep their customers' information secure. The widespread use of wireless technology by businesses, as in homes, has left merchants' computer systems increasingly susceptible.

Identrus has announced the closing of a $20 million Series B round of financing led by Enterprise Partners Venture Capital and Rho Ventures with participation by existing investor Zions Bancorporation.

"Today's significant investment represents an important validation that identity authentication is a real issue for the banking community and financial services industry at large," said Karen Wendel, CEO, Identrus. "This additional funding will enable us to expand our solutions, deepen our client relationships and continue to build a world-class network."

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