Barron's reports on research from Morgan Stanley about Safeway (from its analyst meeting on Tuesday of this week) discussing Safeway's Blackhawk Network subsidary. According to the report, Safeway estimates that Blackhawk will sell $1.6 billion in gift card value in 2006 and estimates that sales could grow to $10-11 billion in gift card value by 2009.

Sheila Riley reports for Investor's Business Daily about the international remittance market - as big banks are growing increasingly interested in this market. Riley quotes Celent analyst Dan Schatt who says "the big opportunity is for banks to basically take back a market that they should have more control over and be able to succeed in."

Standard Chartered and First Data Corp. have announced an agreement to jointly establish a new company to provide merchant acquiring services to merchants across Asia.

Dave Birch writes about the recently announced Barclays dual-interface chip cards - containing both contact and contactless interfaces for communicating to acceptance devices. Dave will shortly be posting a podcast with Barclay's project head Richard Mould talking about this new program.

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