Dan Fitzpatrick writes for Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about "how Charlotte became a banking giant, outpacing Pittsburgh's banks." According to Fitzpatrick, "the Charlotte banks pressed ahead with dozens and dozens of acquisitions across the country, taking on new names with each deal and eventually turning this little-known textile and distribution hub into BankTown USA." Charlotte, of course, is home to Wachovia and Bank of America.

Gregory Karp writes for the Allentown Morning Call about how consumers can haggle for betters terms from their credit card issuers. According to Karp, "it's cheaper for card issuers to cut you a break than lose your business and have to find a new customer. All you have to do is ask a card company to lower your interest rate, raise your limit or waive your fees."

Ian Pollock reports for the BBC on how 40 years ago "an old converted shoe and boot factory in Northampton was the site for a revolution in the nation's borrowing and spending habits 40 years ago. It was there that 30 new bank clerks, freshly recruited the month before, joined a team of ten or so managers from Barclays bank to launch the country's first ever credit card - the Barclaycard." David Smith writes for the London Times and takes another look at the last 40 years of credit cards in the UK.

Yesterday, Eric Dash of the New York Times reported on an interview he had with Bank of America chairman and CEO Ken Lewis who spoke about the success of the integration of MBNA into BofA, plans to launch new affinity bank products (physicians as the first group likely to be targeted), and who might be a bigger competitor in the future. Lewis mentioned Wachovia on the east coast, Wells Fargo on the west coast, Citibank - who he says is a small player in terms of retail distribution - and that leaves JP Morgan Chase.

What a mess the card industry has made of one of its former features - being able to use your bank cards when traveling internationally and knowing that they'd work and that you were getting the best possible deal on foreign currency conversion in the process. That simple and consistent value proposition went out the window a couple of years back when credit card issuers began aggressively surcharging international transactions and more recently as some bank debit card issuers have limited international acceptance and access to local cash at ATMs because of fraud concerns. David Kelly writes in today's New York Times Travel section about what the experts currently recommend for international travelers and their financial needs while on the road. Kathleen Pender also shares some tips for international travelers in the San Francisco Chronicle.

In an article on BillingWorld.com titled "Smart Phones Could Drive New Telecom Business Model", author Susana Schwartz writes about the potential for mobile payments and challenges mobile operators to realize that the time has come for them to "determine what role they intend to play, and how to drive merchants and content providers to their customers and networks." According to Schwartz, "the killer app could be the RFID-driven capabilities fostered by the NFC chips, which will allow users to quickly drill down into financial transactions over their phones through machine-to-machine interaction between the phone and banking systems."