The Stop & Shop Supermarket Company issued a press release late today updating news of an earlier suspected security breach: "On Monday night, associates in our Coventry, Rhode Island, Stop & Shop noticed suspicious activity at the front of the store near our cash registers. Our associates called the Coventry Police, who responded immediately and arrested four individuals."

Jessica Anderson writes for Kiplinger.com about being a person-to-person lender on Prosper.com - saying it "offers financial rewards with a dose of good karma."

Bankrate.com reports on news out of the UK that Lloyds TSB plans to begin charging cardholders fees of £35 per year if they don't use their credit cards often enough. More details about the plan are available in this BBC story.

Aliaswire has announced the general availability of PayVox, a "Voice-Activated Bill Payment solution that has been designed exclusively for the prepaid card industry. Using just a prepaid debit card, PayVox allows users to pay bills over the phone or the web in a manner previously only available to on-line banking bill-pay customers."

Visa USA has announced that nearly twenty issuers, partners, processors and acquiring financial institutions have agreed to implement Visa ReadyLink, Visa’s prepaid load network service. Visa recently announced an agreement with Blackhawk Network’s alliance partner stores, making Safeway the first in Blackhawk Network’s alliance of 60,000 stores in North America to implement Visa ReadyLink.

The European Financial Management & Marketing Association has announced a conference titled "Trust in Online Finance - Creating Safe and Trusted Online Offerings" to be held in Brussels on Thursday-Friday, April 26-27.

comScore Networks has released the results of a study analyzing usage of online bill payment services at leading banks - "defined as paying a bill online from a checking, savings, or money market account using the functionality in the bill pay portion of the bank's Web site and where the recipient of the money is not the bank itself. According to the study, among those consumers who had one or more checking, savings, or money market accounts and who used online bank bill pay during the quarter with a leading financial institution Bank of America achieved 65 percent penetration in Q4 2006. Wells Fargo ranked second in penetration of online bill payers, with a level of 18 percent, followed by Chase and Wachovia (each achieved 13 percent penetration)."

Bank of America is webcasting the second day of its annual investor conference today. Yesterday's webcast is also available for viewing online.

A presentation by Barbara Desoer, Chief Technology & Operations Officer, titled "Payments: The Opportunity" is particularly of interest to payments professionals - she notes that "payments drive more revenue for banks than any other business." Additional presentations from the conference are available online.

Glenbrook's next Payments Boot Camp, scheduled for Atlanta, Georgia on March 13 and 14, has only a few open seats remaining. Carol Coye Benson and Scott Loftesness will be teaching this session. If you're interested in attending this boot camp in Atlanta, please be sure to register now as we're just about sold out.

Glenbrook's Merchants Payments Boot Camp, specifically tailored for retailers, ecommerce merchants, etc. is being held March 21 and 22 in the San Francisco Bay Area. Allen Weinberg, Russ Jones and Jay DeWitt will be teaching this session. Registration is available online.

For answers to any questions about Glenbrook's Payments Boot Camps, you can contact us at bootcamp@glenbrook.com.

Damon Williams has posted about his new book for PayPal developers titled "Pro PayPal E-Commerce." Williams says he's "pulled together just about all of the different options that PayPal offers to web developers, and included lots of sample code and best practices for developing your website or application."

You'll find more books specially selected for payments professionals at the Payments News Store.

Capital One has announced the No Hassle Cash Rewards credit card that "offers (one percent) cash back on purchases without the complicated requirements, confusing language and frustrating expiration periods of other cash back rewards programs."

NetBanker's Jim Bruene has announced the publication of new research titled "Mobile Banking & Payments 2.0" - saying that "after three months of looking at mobile banking, talking to more players, and trying to develop a reasonable forecast, we have tempered our initial enthusiasm a bit. While we remain optimistic that the mobile channel will someday eclipse desktop online banking ... in North America mobile banking is NOT a new channel, but rather an extension of existing sales and service channels." The report is available for $495 or included with a subscription to Online Banking Report.

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