This holiday shopping season, gift cards are hot, but shopping for your spouse is not - according to PayPal's 2007 Holiday Survey conducted in October by Nielsen Customized Research.   » Continue Reading

MasterCard Incorporated has announced financial results for third-quarter 2007, reporting net revenues of $1.08 billion, a 20.1% increase versus the same period in 2006 and net income of $314 million including after-tax gains of $70 million from the partial sale of the company's investment in Redecard S.A. in Brazil. A MasterCard presentation on the results is available online.   » Continue Reading

In an article titled 'Mobile Wallet Will Take Time to Mature In U.S.', RIchard Winston from Accenture writes for Bank Systems & Technology magazine about the challenges in bringing mobile payments to the US market. Winston says "the technology will take time to mature, requiring banks, credit card issuers, cellular carriers and merchants to either cooperate or be forced to act by disruptive competitors entering the market."

Separately, David Evans asks whether Google will be the catalyst for the mobile ecosystem in the US. He says "however, Google faces the same difficulty that other developers have faced–which is interacting with the mobile carriers who understandably want to get paid for their vast investments in mobile capacity." Evans spoke at last week's CTIA conference in San Francisco.

In a post titled "Wells Fargo: Hitching its Reins to Mobile Banking", Brandon McGee writes for the Mobile Money & Banking blog about Wells Fargo's rollout of mobile banking services. McGee writes: "what captured my attention is that Wells Fargo seems to have strategically positioned themselves as the leader in mobile banking."

• Citi Cards Selects Wright Express to Support Commercial Oil Card Services
• Dynamic Card Solutions’ CardWizard Named First Instant Issuance Software to Achieve Rigorous Visa Payment Application Best Practices Validation
• Lending Club Partners with Top University Alumni Associations to Promote Affinity-Based Lending
• eBay Introduces the Perfect Gift for the Holidays -- the New eBay Gift Card
• BS&T: Banks Using Mobile Phone for Out-of-Band Authentication
• BS&T: The Best of the Rest: Web 2.0 Early Adopters in Banking

Mercator Advisory Group has announced a new report titled "Decoupled Debit - Let's Take a Closer Look" that the company says "evaluates the recent emergence of this new and possibly disruptive technology in the financial services industry, decoupled debit. Decoupled debit is an alternative based ACH debit card solution that utilizes two existing systems that are well defined in the financial services industry but were not designed to work in combination with each other, the ACH network and the branded payment networks such as MasterCard, Visa, NYCE, etc."   » Continue Reading

Comdata Stored Value Solutions has announced the results of its fifth annual survey of gift card purchases showing that "the availability of gift card malls and expanded uses for gift cards are making them even more popular and versatile."   » Continue Reading

Shopping.com has announced it has "signed deals with some of the nation’s top retailers to offer their gift cards online this season, all from one convenient place. Shoppers will be able to easily compare brand name cards in various increments for everyone on their holiday list."   » Continue Reading

BSG Clearing Solutions has announced a new mobile phone payment solution called Bill2Phone-Mobile that enables multimedia merchants to deliver digital content to mobile phones and bill those content charges to subscribers’ mobile phone bills.   » Continue Reading

Mercator Advisory Group has announced a new report titled "Small Business Credit Card 2007 Update: Competition for Segments Intensifies" that examines recent developments in the highly competitive small business credit card marketplace.   » Continue Reading

In an article titled 'The $915B bomb in consumers' wallets', Peter Gumbel writes for Fortune about increasing concerns that credit-strapped consumers may accelerate the delinquency rates for US credit card issuers. He suggests looking at the experience in the UK - saying it's about 18 months ahead of the US in the current credit cycle. He notes that "credit card delinquencies and charge-off rates in Britain have risen as much as 50%".

In an article titled 'Barclays becomes major credit card player', Leslie A. Poppas writes for the Wilmington News Journal about Barclay's US credit card business. "While employment at other credit card issuers in the area has decreased, employment at Barclays has tripled since the London bank bought Juniper for $293 million in December 2004. This month, Barclays hired its 1,000th Delaware employee and now employs 1,012 people in the state..."

Akamai Technologies has introduced what the company is calling "the industry’s first and only PCI-compliant site acceleration service. PCI-compliant site and transaction acceleration will provide companies conducting ecommerce online with the assurance that sensitive credit card information is transmitted over a platform that is PCI-compliant."   » Continue Reading

Juniper Research has announced a new report titled "Mobile Payments: Strategies & Markets, 2007-2011". The report provides "detailed market sizing, forecasts until 2011, player analysis and positioning strategies."   » Continue Reading

Metavante has announced the availability of its Healthcare Gateway - calling it "a single online portal through which most eligibility inquiries, claims submissions and status checks, and payments activities can flow and be monitored on-demand electronically."   » Continue Reading

• eBay Shares Tips on Online Shopping Safety
• ACS Expands Pennsylvania's Electronic Payment Card Program; Better Recipient Service, Lower Costs Seen
• Simon Property Group and American Express Team up to Create the Simon American Express(R) Giftcard
• Credit Card Processing Company Bestlinkslive.com Announces Re-Launch of their New Website
• Union Bank of California Banks on Savvion for Business Process Improvement

In an article titled 'The Borrower Who Never Was', Christopher Conkey writes for the Wall St. Journal about synthetic identity fraud - where made up identities are used to perpetrate financial fraud. "This kind of fraud doesn't usually directly affect consumers. The big losers are banks, which get stuck with loan defaults and unpaid credit-card bills that identity thieves leave behind."

Jaikumar Vijayan writes for Computerworld about last week's announcement by Visa of new payment application security mandates. "Basically, they require any company that accepts payment card transactions to ensure that all third-party payment applications they use to store, process or transmit cardholder data comply with a set of minimum security requirements from Visa."

Mark Schwanhausser writes for the San Jose Mercury News about mobile banking - saying that, for banks to succeed with mobile banking, "they must show customers it's convenient and easy to use their cell phone to check balances, transfer money and watchdog their finances even if they're miles from a computer."

• Mercantec Joins TrialPay Network to Help Online Merchants Turn Browsers Into Buyers
• RentPayment’s Automated Rent Collection Process Keeps AvalonBay on Top
• Webinar - Nov. 7: Reducing the Hidden Costs of Remote Deposit Capture and Branch/Teller Capture, While Improving Customer Experience
• Boston Globe: Visa fines bank $880,000 after losses in TJX breach
• Heartland Payment Systems Selects OTI Contactless Payment Solution to Deploy New Student Payment Card
• Business Week: Gift Cards with a Personal Touch
• Obopay India To Close $10 Million In Funding
• Debit cards require caution
• TSYS prepares for new era
• Metavante Announces Its Board of Directors

Earlier this month, during its review of quarterly financial results, Google's management was asked about the progress of Google Checkout. Jonathan Rosenberg responded:

"I think the real story that is important there is that many of the advertisers that we are working with, such as Jockey, are reporting much, much higher click-through rates. They achieved as much as 60% higher with Checkout and they decreased the cost-per-click by over 31% with Google AdWords and Google Checkout. So we are seeing much more significant volumes in terms of some of these advertisers and the performance with the advertisers."

Péralte C. Paul writes for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about TSYS' plans based upon an interview with Philip W. Tomlinson, chairman and chief executive of the Columbus, Georgia-based payments processor. Earlier this week, TSYS announced it was being spun out of parent Synovus Financial to become an independent public company.

Kris Hundley writes for the St. Petersburg Times about hometown company Revolution Money - saying that "the company's two products, a PayPal competitor called Revolution MoneyExchange and a PIN-based credit card called Revolution Card, are ready to take on the MasterCards and Visas of the world."

The Payment Cards Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia has published a new discussion paper titled "The Merchant-Acquiring Side of the Payment Card Industry: Structure, Operations, and Challenges" .   » Continue Reading

Aniruddha Ghosh writes for India's Economic Times about the work Citi India and mChek are doing in India that enables a variety of services using the mobile phone as a remote customer signature device. "To ensure security, users of such services have a unique passcode which will prevent misuse even if their phone is lost. These transactions operate on a ‘remote signature’ principle, and are validated by one-time PINs generated separately for each transaction."

Tony Russomanno reports for San Francisco's CBS5.com about Obopay - and using its person to person money transfer service instead of Western Union. Although currently US only, Russomanno reports the company plans international support for moving money.

TSYS has announced that "it has entered into an agreement and plan of distribution with Synovus, under which Synovus plans to distribute all of its shares of TSYS common stock in a spin-off to Synovus shareholders. Under the terms and conditions of the agreement, TSYS will become a fully independent company."   » Continue Reading

In a report titled "European Mobile Banking: An Inconvenient Truth", Forrester's Benjamin Ensor writes about adoption of mobile banking in Europe - saying that "although most leading European retail banks offer mobile banking services based on SMS and mobile Internet to everyone with a capable phone, only 5% of Net users use them today. Those who do tend to be young, technology-savvy males with above-average incomes who already bank online."

• Clark Howard: Credit, debit card safeguards need updating to prevent fraud

U.S. Bank has announced that it has issued its 20 millionth gift card this week, remaining the top Visa gift card issuer in the US. U.S. Bank reached the 10 millionth gift card milestone in July 2006, doubling the size of its gift card program in just over a year.   » Continue Reading

Ross Kerber writes for the Boston Globe about more filings in the TJX litigation now underway in Boston - including a review by Joel Lisker, a former MasterCard security executive.

First Data Prepaid Services reports on a study of the use of gift cards as consumer incentives - saying it's "a growing trend to which consumers are responding positively."   » Continue Reading

Visa has announced that 65 percent of the largest U.S. merchants (those processing six million or more Visa transactions annually) have now validated their compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), up from 36 percent in December 2006. Among medium-sized merchants (those processing one to six million Visa transactions annually), compliance grew from 15 percent in December 2006 to 43 percent as of September 30, 2007. The merchants that comprise these two categories account for approximately two-thirds of Visa's U.S. transaction volume.   » Continue Reading

• Visa mandates that merchants eliminate the use of vulnerable payment applications
• Wachovia Unveils Single Sign-On for Wholesale Services, Advancing Vision of Globally Integrated Online Delivery
• Third Quarter U.S. Retail E-Commerce Grows 23 Percent Versus Last Year
• Meeting of the E-Commerce Minds: Leading Retailers, Brands and Industry Experts Convene for GSI Commerce's Annual Partner Summit
• BankServ Partners With Capital Payments to Offer Innovative e-Check Processing and Remote Deposit Solutions
• More than 5,000 Bank Customers Now Benefit from Goldleaf's Remote Deposit Solution
• Alliance Data Signs Multi-Year Expansion and Renewal Agreement with Alon USA

Tampa's Fox 13 TV has a video story about the new Revolution Card from Revolution Money. The video emphasizes the lower cost of Revolution Card acceptance for merchants vs. Visa, MasterCard, etc.

Aite Group has published a new report titled "Mobile Banking Security: The Black Cloud Attached to the Silver Lining" that it says "investigates security vulnerabilities for mobile banking, both now and in the near future, focusing on the methods that are being deployed to mitigate risk over this emerging channel."   » Continue Reading

Ross Kerber reports for the Boston Globe that recent court filings by a group of banks suing TJX over its breach of payment card data say that about 65 million Visa account numbers and about 29 million MasterCard account numbers were compromised. Fraud losses were estimated to range between $68 million and $83 million.

mFoundry has announced completion of a $15 million Series C round of financing led by Motorola Ventures, the strategic venture capital arm of Motorola, Inc. PayPal, NCR Corporation and a "leading wireless operator" also joined the round along with existing investors.   » Continue Reading

• Adoption of Online Banking by U.S. Small Businesses to Cross 50 Percent Mark
• Federal Reserve: 5 Tips for Protecting Your Checking Account
• Kofax and Open Scan Technologies Announce Joint Reseller Agreement
• Gartner Survey Shows More U.S. Consumers Concerned About Excessive Bank Fees Than Security Issues When Leaving a Financial Institution
• Moneris Solutions and Sage Payment Solutions Renew Processing Agreement
• Merchant Advisory On Timing of Payment for PIN Debit Overcharges
• M:Metrics Study: 92.5 Million Active SMS Users Make Short Code-Based Mobile Marketing the Most Effective Platform for Mobile Advertisers
• Datacard Group Introduces Easy-to-Integrate Kiosk Card Printer

We're starting to see some pretty mainstream adoption of alternative payments (i.e., non-bank card-based) - what with PayPal's march through the skies with the airlines, Bill Me Later's very effective use of promotional financing, etc. PayPal recently reported that 44% of its payment volume was coming from its Merchant Services business (i.e., non-auction related).

Yesterday, drugstore.com reported third quarter financial results - and they included the following snippet regarding the value to a merchant of accepting alternative payments:

"...almost 10% of OTC transactions in recent weeks have migrated to alternative payment options since the completion of our roll-out of Bill Me Later, Google Checkout and PayPal."

Here's a real-life example of an ecommerce merchant who didn't fool around trying to decide which alternative payment type to implement - they just implemented all three of the majors!

Maria Bruno-Britz writes for Bank Systems & Technology about decoupled debit - and whether it's a threat or an opportunity for banks.

ACI Worldwide has announced that it will offer enhanced mobile banking capabilities to its online banking customers. "ACI’s business and consumer online banking customers will be able to use their cell phones, wireless handheld devices, or other handset devices to view information and perform online functions. Banks will be able to offer mobile access as an alternate channel while leveraging investment in Enterprise Banker data, entitlements and authentication."   » Continue Reading

Glenbrook's Carol Coye Benson filed an update on NACHA-related topics this morning from this week's Association for Financial Professionals conference in Boston.

RBS Lynk has announced it is now offering its merchants a way to reach online banking users who want to pay cash at eCommerce checkouts by offering MODASolutions eBillme payment option. eBillme provides consumers with "the ability to safely and securely pay cash using their online banking bill pay service."   » Continue Reading

Visa has released a new white paper - “Commercial Cards and Financial Compliance” - "to help organizations meet financial accountability requirements in many countries around the world. The paper identifies best practices in electronic payment programs for the travel and entertainment (T&E) management process and Procure-to-Pay function deployed by companies worldwide to help satisfy compliance requirements and achieve more control and visibility over spending."   » Continue Reading

• Visa USA and Personal Finance Expert Jean Chatzky Launch National Women's Savings Initiative at California Governor and First Lady's Conference on Women
• INSIDE Contactless Announces General Availability of Next Generation MicroPass Fob Core for Contactless Payments
• Hit the jackpot? Americans say “no thanks” to giant check, “yes” to direct deposit, according to national poll
• TSYS Reports 26.7% Increase in Net Income for Third Quarter 2007
• Aneace's Blog: Why an unregulated interchange model is crucial to fostering competition between payment schemes
• Mobile Candy Dish and CardMarte Partner to Expand Mobile Commerce Globally
• First Data's Telecheck And Meijer Reach Agreement To Roll Out Electronic Check Acceptance
• ViVOtech Announces ViVOpay 5000 Contactless Payment Reader for Use with New MasterCard® PayPass™ Programs in EMEA, Latin America, and Canada
• FundsTech Corp Announces Strategic Partnership Agreement With Yes!Money in Europe
• Fundtech’s Sanjay Dalmia Authors Book on Financial Supply Chain

American Express has announced financial results for the third quarter - reporting that "third quarter diluted EPS from continuing operations" increased 18% over last year. Worldwide billed business grew 16% to $162.5 billion, worldwide cards in force great 11% to 84.7 million, and worldwide average spending per proprietary card increased 8% to $3,006 in the quarter.

Utica College’s Center for Identity Management and Information Protection has published the results of what it is calling "a landmark study of closed U.S. Secret Service cases involving identify theft."   » Continue Reading

Glenbrook's Carol Coye Benson is attending this weeks Association of Financial Professionals (AFP) conference in Boston. She filed her first report from the conference earlier this morning.

Tony Adams writes for the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer about TSYS and its potential spin-out from Synovus Financial Corp.

Wells Fargo has announced what it calls "another component of its Wells Fargo Mobile service: text banking. This addition makes Wells Fargo the first major financial services company in the country to offer its consumer and small business customers both browser- and text-based account access via their mobile devices." Wells Fargo has posted an FAQ on the new Wells Fargo Mobile text banking service.   » Continue Reading

mFoundry has announced that IBC Bank, the Laredo, Texas-based bank of International Bancshares Corporation, has selected mFoundry's Mobile Banking solution to provide IBC’s customers with real-time, on-demand access to their IBC checking, savings and credit card accounts.   » Continue Reading

Sybase 365 has announced the availability of Sybase mBanking 365 - calling it "an innovative new suite of products for the financial industry enabling banks to interact with customers in real-time through mobile alerts, two-way banking services, out-of-band authentication, and marketing campaigns."   » Continue Reading

MasterCard Worldwide and First Data Corp. have announced that "First Data will make the MasterCard Payment Gateway available to its network of 3.5 million merchant locations throughout the United States."   » Continue Reading

Visa has announced that it is extending its Visa Money Transfer service in India with a new mobile capability developed by mChek. Visa Money Transfer, launched by Visa in India in 2004, is a domestic card-to-card money transfer service that enables a Visa cardholder to transfer money conveniently and securely to another Visa account number. mChek is providing the software for mobile handsets and processing capabilities to link up to VisaNet, Visa’s global transaction processing network, for the new mobile service.   » Continue Reading

Bank of America has announced that the national restaurant chain Chick-fil-A is piloting a "revolutionary Bank of America technology that will automate and simplify cash handling for retailers and give them faster access to funds."   » Continue Reading

NYCE has announced The Washington Trust Company has agreed to "a long-term NYCE Network participation renewal, which names NYCE as its sole provider of retail PIN debit and domestic ATM card access."   » Continue Reading

• Heartland Payment Systems Acquires General Meters Corporation
• Electronic Payment Exchange Launches Revolutionary Cardholder Data Security Solution, BuyerWall™
• Global Payments to Provide Comprehensive Payment Processing Services to HSBC Bank Canada's Clients
• Major Supermarket Retailer, Hy-Vee Inc., Set to Recognize Full Value of Back-Office Check Imaging and Conversion from NCR
• Discover Polls Reveal True Character of the American Entrepreneur
• Bottomline Technologies Optimizes WebSeries(R) Payments Platform for Corporate Finance Departments and Shared Service Centers
• China UnionPay to complete national electronic payment network next year
• Atrua Made-For-Mobile Fingerprint Solution Enables First-Of-Its-Kind Mobile Commerce Trial In U.S.
• Kyocera Wireless Mobile Phones Excel in Cellular South WirelessWallet Consumer Trial
• Oracle Rapidly Integrates Bharosa Software to Deliver New Oracle Identity Management Offering that Helps Organizations Combat Online Identity Theft and Fraud
• Prevalence of Online Fraud Accelerates Demand for VeriSign(R) Identity Protection
• AFP Survey: B2B Electronic Payments Growing, Checks Declining
• Braintree Payment Solutions announces integration with PayPal, Google Checkout, and Bill Me Later
• Barclays and Miles & More Launch the Miles & More Mastercard for Lufthansa's Global U.S. Travelers
• Ericsson’s Mobile Payment and Messaging Service to Support Twitter’s US And International Expansion
• ACI and uMonitor Partner to Add Online Account Opening and Funding Services to ACI Enterprise Enrollments Offering
• AFP, IBM and Deutsche Bank Announce Partnership to Develop Treasury Benchmarking Program
• Dashwire Makes Using Your Mobile Phone Easier – From Your Computer
• Trintech Announces the Availability of LCM Payments, a Next Generation Account Reconciliation and Positive Pay Solution for Financial Institutions
• Gemalto Provides Web Services to SEB’s German Affiliate for Designing Personalized Credit Cards
• MasterCard Worldwide Wins 2007 AFP Pinnacle Award Grand Prize

We have received news of the following recent management changes:

• Rod Dir has been named Chief Operating Officer at Firethorn Holdings where he will oversee the company's sales, marketing, product development, customer care, product implementation and service delivery. Dir was most recently Chief Operating Officer at Cincinnati Bell, Inc.

PayPal VP of Core Technologies Matthew Mengerink writes for LinuxInsider about PayPal's use of open source software - saying that it's fundamental to dealing with the "two competing demands" of PayPal's business model: "security and innovation."

An article titled "Giving a Gift to Merchants and Banks" By M. P. Dunleavey in today's New York Times discusses "hidden fees" associated with gift cards. While retailers have largely dropped such fees - in response to, among other things, a number of states adopting laws prohibiting them and action by the FTC against a couple of major merchants - banks haven't. Dunleavey writes "While it’s good to know there has been progress on the retail front, bank-issued gift cards are widely known as the worst fee offenders."

India's Economic Times reports on the Reserve Bank of India's plans to come out with regulations covering mobile banking. The RBI's draft Financial Sector Technology Vision document is available online. "The large scale spread of mobile telephony has opened up new vistas for banking in the form of mobile banking and the potential in this new sphere is enormous; adequate steps to ensure safety and security in a mobile based computing / communicating environment have to, however, be made."

PayPal has announced the official grand opening of its new technology center in Austin, Texas. PayPal Data Services, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of PayPal, Inc., is employing technology and engineering professionals who are helping to build PayPal's global payment platform. PayPal plans to hire hundreds of talented local professionals in the next three years, and is now accepting resumes for technical positions.

Revolution Money's chairman Ted Leonsis and CEO Jason Hogg spoke this week at the Web 2.0 Summit being held in San Francisco. Barron's Eric Savitz captured some of the discussion on his Tech Trader Daily blog. "Leonsis is saying they are looking for way to disrupt the fees in the credit card business, and figure out how to drive some of them back to the consumer." Others writing about the discussion include Information Week's Mitch Wagner. "We want to become to social networks what PayPal is to eBay."

• PayPal Data Services Celebrates Technology Center Opening in Austin
• WSJ: CEO Vows to Fix Bank of America

Mobilians International has announced its entry into the U.S. - bringing with it what it describes as "a compelling new online payment method, already successful in Asia, that allows a consumer to buy items online and use the mobile phone and mobile account for quick, easy transactions with no credit cards required." The company expects to commence active payment transactions with online merchants in the first quarter of 2008.   » Continue Reading

HSBC Finance Corporation’s card and retail services business and Pathmark Stores have announced "an agreement to offer a multi-purpose rewards and payment card for supermarket customers. The new Pathmark Advantage Payment Card enhances the current Pathmark Advantage Club card by providing an easy and superior one-swipe payment process that also generates loyalty rewards." The card is linked to the consumer's checking account and functions as a PIN-debit card for purchases. The cards will also be accepted "at more than 200,000 merchant locations in the U.S. that participate in the Tempo Payment Network."   » Continue Reading

The Center for Financial Services Innovation has announced "the initiation of the first comprehensive, authoritative national segmentation study of the underbanked market. Citi, eFunds (now part of Fidelity National Information Services), H&R Block and MasterCard are together sponsoring the research. All are members of CFSI’s Innovators Roundtable, which brings together groundbreaking, nationally significant financial services companies to collaborate toward accelerating underbanked practice across the industry."   » Continue Reading

The GSM Association (GSMA), a global trade association representing over 700 GSM mobile phone operators, and Western Union have announced an agreement "to facilitate the development of cross-border mobile money transfer services."   » Continue Reading

Mercator Advisory Group has published a new report titled "Account-Level Processing: Taking a Swipe at Payment and Loyalty Convergence". "The report focuses on Account-Level Processing (ALP), alternately known as Account-Level Management (ALM), which has the potential to revolutionize the payments landscape by optimizing the value that inherently exists within the data created by card-based electronic payments, thereby fundamentally changing the way consumers and merchants transact, as well as the way the general card payment services industry functions."   » Continue Reading

Grant Buckler writes for The Globe and Mail about multi-factor authentication and online banking - reporting that "combining passwords with questions and/or web cookies is the most popular multi-factor authentication technique online."

• News.com: Amazon 1-Click patent rejected
• E-junkie Integrates TrialPay to Help Merchants Turn Clicks Into Customers
• RBS Lynk and Trustwave Provide Merchant PCI DSS Compliance Services
• Fiserv Leads All Core Processors with Branch and Merchant Capture Sales
• Paymetric Announces Release of PCMATM, Payment Card Management and Analytics Application for SAP Enterprise Systems
• Visa USA and 48 Hour Film Project Announce Winning Amateur Filmmakers in "Life Takes'' Invitational
• HDX Launches its Dexit Prepaid Payment Service at Ontario High Schools
• Digital Check Appoints Bruce Rennecker Vice President of Product Management and Marketing

eBay reported third quarter 2007 financial results earlier today - saying that "PayPal posted another excellent quarter of Total Payment Volume (TPV) and revenue growth, primarily driven by its Merchant Services business, with acceleration in both."

PayPal net revenues totaled $470 million in Q3-07, a growth rate of 35% over the prior year. PayPal's total payment volume (TPV) was $12.22 billion in Q3-07, up 34% from Q3-06. PayPal Merchant Services contributed $5.38 billion globally to the $12.22 billion in global TPV in Q3-07, representing a year-over-year increase of 61% .

PayPal had 164 million total accounts at the end of Q3-07, a 34% increase from the 122.5 million reported at the end of Q3-06 and almost 11 million from the prior quarter. Of that number of total accounts, 37.5 million were active in the quarter, up 21% from Q3-06.

PayPal reported a transaction revenue rate of 3.67% for the quarter, a transaction expense rate of 1.15% and a transaction loss rate of 0.26%.

Bryan Johnson blogs on the Braintree Payment Solutions blogs about PCI compliance and the potential cost of a data security breach involving payment card information.

MasterCard has announced the launch of World MasterCard for Business - calling it "a premium payment card that provides high-spending small businesses with more spending power, superior customer service and enhanced rewards." Chase Card Services is the first credit card issuer to introduce MasterCard World for Business cards.   » Continue Reading

Chase Card Services has announced what it is calling "the first-ever MasterCard World for Business credit cards" with the introduction of the new Continental Airlines World MasterCard for Business and the GM Business Card World MasterCard. The new GM card will include blink, Chase's contactless payment feature.   » Continue Reading

In much of the work that we do, we're fascinated how often the notion of market segmentation emerges as a dominant theme. Dave Birch blogs about that idea, Clayton Christensen and more in his post about how a "one size, fits all" approach to thinking about card payments "might be rather old-fashioned."

JP Morgan Chase has announced its financial results for 3Q07 . For its card services unit, it reported average outstandings up 5%, charge volume growth of 3%, revenue up 6% and net income up 11%. Chase reported a net charge-off rate of 3.64% and also said that it expected credit card losses to return to normalized levels in the 4.00% - 4.50% range by the end of 2008.

The Mobile Payment Forum has announced it will hold its Fall Members Meeting October 23-24, 2007 at The Marriott Chateau Champlain in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.   » Continue Reading

• Global Payments Completes Integration of Discover Network Card Acceptance for Merchants
• Serebra Launches Prepaid Mastercard(R) Cardglobal Payment Solution for Serebra Connect(TM)
• Direct Marketing Educational Foundation Presents Edward N. Mayer Educational Leadership Award to Tim Litle
• SmartPay Wins Best Mobile Payment Golden Olive Award
• Mercury Payment Systems and Datacap Systems, Inc. Release Integrated Payment Processing Solutions for Cash Registers
• Experian's ChoiceScore(SM) Helps Direct Marketers Strategically Reach Rich Pool of Under-Marketed Consumers
• Bloomberg.com: KKR Bankers Sell $2.2 Billion of First Data Bonds