In an article titled 'Retailers Look to Put a Halt To Rising Chargeback Losses", Cards&Payments takes a look at the issue of "friendly fraud". Glenbrook's Allen Weinberg comments: "It's a big unspoken problem," says Allen Weinberg, managing partner of Glenbrook Partners, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based payments-consulting firm. "No one wants to talk about it because it shows the system is being abused, and the merchants get left holding the bag."

In a regulatory filing today with the SEC, Morgan Stanley announced that the spin-out of Discover Financial Services is now scheduled for June 30, 2007.

Earlier this week, First Data Corp. filed a proxy statement with the SEC containing further details about its acquisition by KKR. Included was a breakdown of equity and debt financing coming into the deal - about $7.2 billion in equity financing (from KKR and several other entities) and about $24 billion from various debt financing vehicles.

Matt Hamblen reports for Computerworld on comments made about mobile banking in the US by Tower Group analyst Bob Egan, in an interview after a keynote address at the consulting firm's financial services conference this week. Egan said currently only about "400,000 consumers are using mobile banking out of almost 240 million mobile phone users in the U.S."

The Bank of Montreal has announced a new loyalty program that rewards Canadian AIR MILES Collectors for all of their debit card transactions. The bank says its new program is a move to capture the personal banking business of AIR MILES collectors who currently represent nine million active collector accounts or approximately two-thirds of Canadian households.

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