We wish you all the best in 2009!

Payments News had a very busy year in 2008 - serving almost 3 million page views to over 600,000 unique visitors. Over the year, our daily email distribution grew by over 2,000 to 5,400 readers - adding 8 new subscribers on average every business day. Another 2,500 readers follow us daily via our RSS feed. And, several hundred readers have started following Payments News in real-time via our newly launched Payments News Twitter feed. Thanks very much for reading Payments News in 2008 - we're looking forward to an even more exciting 2009!

Looking back over the year, here are the top 11 most viewed individual news stories posted to Payments News this year:

1. Citi Introduces Extra Cash - New Rewards Program (May 29, 2008)
2. Bank of America, Wells Fargo Form Payment Processing Joint Venture (May 15, 2008)
3. Secure Vault Payments - A Bank-Centric Alternative Payment System (August 15, 2008)
4. JPMorgan Chase, First Data To End Chase Paymentech Joint Venture (May 27, 2008)
5. PULSE Releases 2008 US Debit Issuer Study (April 29, 2008)
6. H.R. 5546 - The Credit Card Fair Fee Act of 2008 (March 07, 2008)
7. Finovate Startup - Best of Show Awards (April 29, 2008)
8. L.L.Bean Chooses Barclays to Launch New L.L.Bean Visa Card (June 30, 2008)
9. Citi to Raise Credit Card Interest Rates (November 15, 2008)
10. PayPal Reports Online Consumer Shopping Trends (March 4, 2008)
11. New Study Finds Declining Credit Card Use in US (July 30, 2008)

The top 11 most viewed categories/tags for 2008 were:

1. Mobile Payments
2. Chase Card Services
3. Prepaid Cards
4. Mobile Banking
5. Citi Cards
6. Money Transfer
7. Contactless Payments
8. Merchant Acquirers
9. Near Field Communication (NFC)
10. PayPal
11. P2P - Person to Person Payments

Best wishes for a great 2009 from Payments News and Glenbrook Partners! Work smart!

In a new article in its on-going Debt Trap series titled "Unspoken Link Between Credit Cards and Colleges", Jonathan Glater writes for the New York Times about colleges and universities and their relationships with credit card issuers. Describing the relationship between Bank of America and Michigan State, Glater writes: "the more students who take the banks’ credit cards, the more money the university gets." He goes on to write that "the relationships are reminiscent of those uncovered two years ago between student loan companies and universities."

Amazon.com has announced that effective today Bill Me Later will no longer be accepted as a payment option on Amazon.com. Bill Me Later was acquired earlier this year by eBay/PayPal. More details are available in the Amazon Seller Forum and in this article on AuctionBytes.

• NYTimes.com: Early Data Shows Holiday Sales Fell 2.3%
• mGive: First Year of Mobile Giving Out Performs First Year of Online Giving
• CreditCards.com: Best credit card stories of 2008
• Los Angeles Times: Firm says it can't pay money it collected for Little Leagues
• Bank Systems & Technology: Crisis a Marketing Opportunity for ING Direct

Bill Tancer of Hitwise Intelligence writes about the holiday shopping season on the web just ended and how it compares to prior years. One finding of note is that "the household income demographic bin with the strongest decline when comparing December 2008 to December 2007 is the upper bracket of those households earning more than $150,000 per year."

See also TechCrunch's commentary. READ MORE »

Pamela Yip writes for the Dallas Morning News that Macy's had a systems issue on Saturday, December 20th that "may have caused multiple debits to some customers' checking accounts."

It's almost the end of 2008 ("good riddens" comes to my mind!) - and we've been exploring a bit. Steve Rubel had a great blog post this morning about using Google's Insights for Search feature to read the "tea leaves" about trends in 2009. He calls it "the closest thing we have to a global time capsule."

One interesting result I found was looking at how PayPal has trended over the last four years - with over twice as much interest demonstrated in PayPal today vs. four years ago.

Another interesting result in the PayPal summary is the strong interest in the UK vs. the US, France and other markets around the world. The top PayPal search term is "PayPal UK" - wonder why that is?

Here's one for Twitter - showing how interest in Twitter has grown like a weed during 2008.

Using the Google Insights for Search tool, you can search for and compare multiple terms - for example, here's PayPal vs. MasterCard - showing search interest in MasterCard remaining flat while PayPal's grew steadily. Curiously, if you look at the top searches related to MasterCard, the top result is "mastercard visa".

Give Google Insights for Search a try using your favorite payments-related phrase. If you find more interesting results, please share them in the comments here!

• CreditCards.com: 9 predictions for credit cards in 2009
• Bankelele: Bank’s Need to Embrace MPesa
• TheSpec.com - Business (Canada): Credit fees skyrocketing
• Digital Money Forum Blog: Defending cash
• San Mateo Daily JournalVisa moving HQ to San Francisco

In an article titled "Credit Line Cuts Could Boomerang", Maria Aspan writes for the American Banker about the various actions now being taken by credit card issuers to reign in credit risk "could soon start causing their customers to do something many homeowners did this year: walk away from their obligations." Aspan cites former credit card industry executives who say that cards with little or no purchasing power left (because of credit line cuts) rank low in terms of consumer's propensity to pay.

After falling to its lowest measurement ever in November, economic confidence among small business owners rose slightly in December. The Discover Small Business Watch rose to 72.8 in December, up 5.3 points from November. The index was buoyed by increased optimism that their own business prospects are improving and an indication that more will increase spending on business development in the next six months. READ MORE »

• Inside Facebook: Not Coming Soon: Facebook Indefinitely Scraps Plans for Platform Payment System
• Eastern Bank Connects to SVPCO Image Payments Network