comScore has released the results of a study of online credit card services that it says "revealed strong growth in the use of the Internet for credit card account management. The study found that customers visited their issuer's site 57 percent more often to service their accounts in 2006 than in 2005. This follows a 55 percent rise in 2005 over 2004. Strong growth in online servicing has continued in the first quarter of 2007, as the number of customer visits to issuers' sites jumped to more than one billion, an increase of 32 percent versus the same period a year ago."

A friend sends along a suggestion that payments professionals interested in a look inside PayPal and its merchant services efforts may want to purchase a copy of a Harvard Business School case titled "PayPal Merchant Services".

The Federal Trade Commission has announced that a federal judge at the request of the FTC has temporarily halted an operation marketing Visa- and MasterCard-branded stored-value cards from making unauthorized debits from consumers’ bank accounts.

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