Today's a day for celebrating! Early this morning, the number of subscribers to the daily email distribution of Payments News crossed 4,000. We're truly delighted with this milestone - and very gratified that so many of you find Payments News useful.

Payments News is a "sideline" for us at Glenbrook - but also a labor of love! Our "day job" is the strategy consulting work we do for a wide range of clients around electronic payments - and our payments education program serving payments professionals.

To keep ourselves current, years ago we started sharing among ourselves the most interesting payments-related news of the day - via an email distribution list. A few years later, it became almost as easy to post to a blog as to send an email - and Payments News was born. The earliest stories here in our archives date back over six years to April 2002.

Today, in addition to the 4,000 daily email subscribers, we serve over 8,000 unique visitors every weekday - many of them finding us (and Glenbrook) when they search for a payments-related topic and end up here. And, in our payments education program, we've now had over 2,000 payments professionals attend one of our Payments Boot Camps!

So, many thanks for being here with us! As always, if you've got comments to help us improve, please send them along anytime by clicking on the Feedback link in the top menu bar - we're all ears and really do appreciate hearing from you! To send us news that you'd like to have covered on Payments News, send it along to us: gotnews@paymentsnews.com.

Glenbrook, by the way, celebrated its seventh birthday just a couple of months ago. If you've got a project in mind where we can help as consultants, just contact any of the Glenbrook team and we'll get right back to you.

WAUSAU Financial Systems and ClairMail have announced an agreement to extend the mobile channel to WAUSAU's remittance processing solutions. According to the two companies, "by integrating ClairMail's Mobile Lockbox technology with its remittance processing managed service, WAUSAU will empower its customers to include payments via mobile phones as part of their receivables processing offering to their clients."   » Continue Reading

Glenbrook's Allen Weinberg and Jim Salters attended this week's Payments 2008 conference in Las Vegas. Jim has just posted a new report about the expedited bill payment opportunity for banks.

Jim writes: "For years, bank-offered bill pay has been a net cost to banks. However, banks and their service providers have been increasingly looking for ways to shift those payments from a net cost, to a source of revenue."

The Merchant's Guide, LLC has announced the release of "Understanding Credit Card Interchange In Card-Not-Present Environments" calling it "the first comprehensive guide developed to provide direct sellers with the tactical knowledge to minimize credit card Interchange fees."   » Continue Reading

Brad Garland's latest Banktastics' The Burst videocast covers his view on the best banking and payments related blogs - including Jim Bruene's Netbanker, Colin Henderson's Bankwatch, The Story, Marketing ROI, and even Payments News too!

As a reminder, we've got a long list of banking and payments blogs on one page here on Payments News. Got more favorites that we've missed? Add yours in the comments to this post or drop us an email!.

MasterCard Worldwide has announced the appointment of Rob Reeg as President, MasterCard Global Technology and Operations, a position Mr. Reeg has held on an interim basis since January 2008. MasterCard Global Technology and Operations (GTO) has its headquarters outside St. Louis and operations around the world.   » Continue Reading

APACS has published new materials to help customers wishing to benefit from the new Faster Payment Service as it begins its rollout on May 27th . APACS has produced a new, downloadable advice guide, How to use the Faster Payments Service , along with an online easy-to-use sort code checker. Customers can input any UK sort code to check whether it is able to receive Faster Payments. More sort codes will be added over the next few months as the service is rolled out. All these materials are available from www.apacs.org.uk.   » Continue Reading

• BBC: How fast is faster payment plan?
• JetBlue Airways and Bill Me Later Reward Summer Travelers With a $25 JetBlue Gift Card and No Payments for 90 Days
• American Express Announces 2008 Membership Rewards® Program Partner Lineup
• Macy’s Launches e-Spot™ Automated Retail Shops in 400 Stores
• Tenet Healthcare Launches Online Bill Pay Solution from NCR
• Bank Systems & Technology: Consumers Have Great Expectations for Online Security
• MasterCard Incorporated to Host Investment Community Meeting on May 29th
• Bloomberg: Gift Card Holders May Get Short-Changed by Bankrupt U.S. Stores
• CNN Money: Visa: Not everywhere you want to be
• NY Daily News: Consumers must wait on new credit-scoring system
• Barclays Bank PLC Partners With PGP Corporation to Safeguard Sensitive Customer and Corporate Information
• ING Direct use new fraud prevention system