Payments News - Weekly Wrap - April 5, 2008

Here's a review of this week's top stories on Payments News:

• Accceptance News
  
  • CompUSA and JetBlue now are accepting PayPal payments.
• Mobile Payments News
  
  • CTIA drove a big announcement week including a new international mobile remittance offering from Western Union, RadioShack, and Affinity Mobile's Trumpet Mobile, a Citi Cards partnership with Firethorn Mobile, an expanded Citi/Obopay mobile person-to-person payment trial, a partnership between Affinity Mobile and mFoundry, and Blaze Mobile Wallet support for NFC on Sprint Nextel and AT&T mobile phones.
  • TextBuyIt is Amazon.com's new SMS-based mobile purchasing service powered by Amazon Payments.
• US Payment Card Interchange Fee News
  
  • Last Saturday, both the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal ran editorials about interchange fees. Adam Levitin responded to the WSJ's call for a market-based solution. Later in the week, several letters to the editor of the WSJ were published reacting to its editorial position on the issue.
  • April 1st is historically the date of the annual revisions to payment card interchange fees. Both Visa (for Visa USA and for Interlink) and MasterCard published their new US interchange fees this week.
• New Services
  
  • Chockstone's SingleSwipe enables merchants to use customer's existing payment card for loyalty tracking.
  • Vindicia announced new services designed to reduce false positives for online merchants.
• Contactless News
  
  • Washington Mutual plans to issue 12-15 million WaMu debit MasterCards with Paypass contactless technology.
  • Barclarycard plans to issue over 1 million contactless Barclaycards in 2008 along with helping drive merchant acceptance of contactless in the UK.
• US Consumer Debt News
  
  • Discover's March US Spending Monitor provided highlighted consumer concerns about the economy and their personal finances.
  • Ethan Cohen-Cole, a financial economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, published a working paper titled "Credit Card Redlining".
  • Research analyst Kristie M. Engemann and economist Michael T. Owyang of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis published an article titled "Extra Credit: The Rise of Short-term Liabilities".
  • The ABA published its fourth quarter 2007 survey of consumer credit delinquencies.
• Card Data Breach News
  
  • MasterCard announced a settlement with TJX
  • The Identity Theft Resource Center said that data breaches in the first quarter of 2008 more than doubled from last year.
• Fraud News
  
  • The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center published the 2007 Internet Crime Report finding that dollar losses from Internet-related crime reached an all-time high.
• Organizational News
  
  • Terri Dial was named Global Head of Consumer Strategy and CEO of Consumer Banking in North America and Steven Freiberg was named CEO of Global Cards for Citi.
• New Jobs Posted on PaymentsJobs.com
  
  • Senior Analyst at Mercator Advisory Group (Waltham, Massachusetts)
  • Manager, Fraud and Risk at PayCycle (Palo Alto, California)
  • Vice President / Director Business Development at i2c (Redwood City, California)

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