Last week in Seattle, the Federal Trade Commission and the Technology Law and Public Policy Clinic at the University of Washington hosted a Town Hall meeting to explore the growth of contactless payment systems and their implications for consumer protection policy. A webcast and transcripts of the presentations are available online. This agenda contains links to several of the presentations.

Yesterday, we noted that Amazon Payments had launched a new, fully featured ecommerce checkout service called Checkout by Amazon along with a new, payments-only service called Amazon Simple Pay. In this post, we take a deeper look at Amazon Simple Pay - which enables third-party web sites to simply enable existing Amazon.com customers to pay using their Amazon payment information. READ MORE »

Visa has announced the extension of its Visa MoneyTransfer service to millions of cardholders. "With the launch of Visa Money Transfer in Indonesia and the expansion of a program in Singapore, Visa is making it easier and more secure for people in 13 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Asia to send and receive funds." READ MORE »

U.S. Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee Members Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine), and Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Maryland) have requested that "the Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigate the structure of credit card interchange fees, which are used to reimburse credit card companies for processing transactions. While credit card companies contend that consumers and businesses receive great benefits from the current system, merchants are concerned that card issuers are pushing the cost of credit card incentives and rewards programs onto businesses and consumers through interchange fees. To examine both sides of the issue, the Senators asked GAO to take a balanced look at whether fees are properly disclosed, how the fees are set, and the level of competition in the marketplace." READ MORE »

Visa Inc. has reported third quarter financial results - reporting that payments volume grew 19% to $652 billion and total volume, including cash, grew 22% to $1.0 trillion. Cards issued grew 14% worldwide to 1.6 billion and payments transaction volume grew 15% to 10.7 billion transactions. Total processed transactions were 9.5 billion, up 13%. A webcast and a presentation on the quarterly results are available online.

Mercator Advisory Group has published a new report titled "Merchant Acquiring in the United States 2008: Birth of the Perfect Storm". Mercator talks about three major events influencing the US merchant acquiring business: 1) Legislation - interchange legislation being considered in Congress, 2) Dissolution - the split of Chase Paymentech between First Data Corp. and JP Morgan Chase, and 3) Recession - the potential effects of a slowdown in the US economy.

Wells Fargo has begun rolling out its new vSafe service to customers in 18 states – Arizona, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin, Wyoming – and the Greater Sacramento area. The vSafe service was announced in March and has been undergoing internal testing since that time. With the new service, "customers can protect and easily access electronic copies of financial, legal and personal files, such as loan and tax documents, wills, passports, medical records, photographs and more, in a safe online location." READ MORE »

Eric Konigsberg and Sewell Chan report for the New York Times on failures on Monday and Tuesday of New York City MetroCard machines that were unable to handle credit and debit cards. They write: "The malfunction raised questions for riders about not only the efficacy of the MetroCard machines but also the larger notion of the American commercial culture’s movement toward an increasingly cashless existence." The outage also provoked this New York Times editorial complaining about the overall design of the MetroCard machines.

In a comprehensive article, Bank of America's Lance Drummond writes for Bank Systems & Technology about the lessons learned during Bank of America's rollout of mobile banking. Earlier this year, the bank announced it had enrolled over 1 million customers for its mobile banking services. Drummond notes that "until mobile banking transforms into customers authorizing mobile payments and interchange via their wireless devices, we might not see significant revenues being generated."

Javelin Strategy & Research has released a report on credit cards and consumer spending finding that Americans are cutting back on credit card use and having difficulty paying off balances. Javelin found "conservative spending behaviors as a result of the economic downturn and the ramifications of the mortgage crisis, soaring fuel costs and rising food prices." READ MORE »

• TSYS Reports Results for Second Quarter 2008
• MyECheck Introduces Virtual Terminal Services for Small Business, Catalog and Call-In Order Operations
• Global Payments Asia-Pacific Expands Its Joint Venture with HSBC to the Philippines
• Adventity and FMT Worldwide Partner to Combat Internet Transaction Fraud
• Umpqua Bank Selects Fiserv for Next-Generation Online Financial Services Solution
• Wright Express to Acquire New Zealand-based Financial Automation Limited
• TheStreet.com: MasterCard and Visa Test Their Limits
• ComputerWeekly.com: How banks are detecting credit fraud

We have received news of the following recent management changes:

• Michael Diamond has been named Senior Vice President, Business Development, at Obopay. Previously, Diamond led business development teams in high-growth information software categories at IBM.