The upcoming acquisition of First Data Corp. by KKR required it to deal with recent changes in Colorado law affecting FDC's industrial bank, First Financial Bank. "The Colorado State Bank Board agreed to a four-part transaction that will effectively convert First Data's industrial bank, First Financial Bank, into a non-depository trust called First Data Trust Co. LLC."

Separately, First Data reported second quarter financial results earlier today.

One of our partners asked me today about the search box in the upper right corner of every Payments News page. We recently changed how that box works - and probably didn't explain that change very effectively. So, let me try again.

The upper right search box is a Google custom search engine that's been specifically optimized by me and a group of volunteer helpers to focus search results on web sites that are somehow payments related. As a result, it's actually the best possible Google search you can do - for payments-related content. If you bookmark Payments News - or use it as your home page - you'll always have this payments-customized search handy.

If you're wanting to only search Payments News pages for something specific, you can use the search box that's "below the fold" in the right sidebar. That search by default only searches Payments News content pages. Hope that helps explain things!

More information about search is available on the Payments News Search page.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago has published "Competitive Forces Shaping the Payments Environment: What’s Next? - A Conference Summary" (PDF) by Tiffany Gates, associate economist, and Katy Jacob, research specialist. The paper is a summary of the Chicago Fed's seventh payments conference held on May 10–11, 2007.

Testimony from today's US House Judiciary Committee Antitrust Task Force hearing on credit card interchange is now available on the task force's web site. Click on the name of the witness to access the prepared testimony.

The Merchants Payments Coalition issued a press release regarding the testimony of Mallory Duncan, Senior Vice President and General Counsel of the National Retail Federation and Chairman of the Merchants Payments Coalition. Duncan "called the collective setting of interchange fees by Visa and MasterCard a violation of federal antitrust laws that costs merchants and their customers more than $36 billion every year."

The Emerging Payments Research Group of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston has published "Consumer Behavior and Payment Choice: 2006 Conference Summary" (PDF) by Margaret Carten, Dan Littman, Scott Schuh, and Joanna Stavins.   » Continue Reading

Bank of America reported second quarter financial results this morning. Included in the results was a statistic about its Keep the Change debit card savings/reward program: "Keep the Change(TM) passed the 5 million mark of customers who have saved more than $500 million since the inception of this innovative program." Even pennies, nickels and dimes add up over time! Keep the Change is an optional free service announced in October 2005 that allows customers to have the bank round up purchase amounts to the nearest whole dollar - putting the difference into a savings account. The bank provides an annual 5% match.

Internet Retailer reports on a recent survey by Stars for Kidz that reported that "77% of children 8 to 14 have completed an online transaction."

PayPal is challenging its developer community in a PayPal Developer Challenge content to develop Facebook widgets that use PayPal. The grand prize available in the Challenge is $10,000.

Michelle Singletary, personal finance columnist for the Washington Post, follows up on the "Out of Balance" report from the Center for Responsible Lending last week and says that "many users have discovered, the debit card has the same problem as its credit card cousin -- you can spend over your limit, causing yourself all kinds of financial havoc." She suggests that financial institutions should "restrain their fee frenzy".

We have received news of the following recent management changes:

• Michael Pratt has been named Chief Marketing Officer for Panini North America.