TowerGroup will be holding a complementary webinar on mobile banking and payments on Thursday, June 19, from 12 Noon to 1 PM Eastern led by Charul Vyas, Analyst, Emerging Technologies.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has released its 14th annual Survey of Credit Underwriting Practices and reported that commercial and retail underwriting standards tightened after four consecutive years of eased underwriting standards. READ MORE »

The Reserve Bank of India has published a "Draft Operating Guidelines for Mobile Payments in India".

"With the rapid growth in the number of mobile phone subscribers in India banks have been exploring the feasibility of using mobile phones as an alternative channel of delivery of banking services. A few banks have started offering information based services like balance enquiry, stop payment instruction of cheques, record of last five transactions, location of nearest ATM/branch etc. Acceptance of transfer of funds instruction for credit to beneficiaries of same/or another bank in favour of pre-registered beneficiaries have also commenced in a few banks. Considering that the technology is relatively new and due care needs to be taken on security of financial transactions, the Reserve Bank of India has felt the need for a set of operating guidelines that can be adopted by banks. "

Read more about the new mobile banking guidelines in this article in India's Economic Times.

The Smart Card Alliance has begun offering a new online course titled "Fundamentals of Smart Card Technology". The online training course takes about six hours to complete and costs $99 per participant.

Stephen Hutcheon writes for the Sydney Morning Herald that eBay intends to "challenge the Australian competition watchdog's ruling to block a plan to force its users onto a PayPal-only payments system." Yesterday, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission announced a draft notice proposing to prevent eBay from implementing a PayPal-only policy in Australia.

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