Over on Payments Views, Glenbrook's Carol Coye Benson weighs in on the state of the U.S. payments industry in 2012. Carol's post thematically looks at the landscape, the key competitive battles, the key innovations, the notable failures, and the untapped opportunities. Here's a hint at what she finds -- "Chaos, fragmentation, value chain disruption, and lots of innovation". Have a look.

Gyft announced its complete application integration with Apple’s Passbook on iOS 6. Gyft offers retailers a simple way to push gift cards to Passbook while giving consumers even more flexibility and convenience for storing, sending, and redeeming their gift cards on Apple’s mobile devices.

“Gyft is thrilled to be fully integrated with Passbook for the launch of iOS 6 and the iPhone 5,” said Vinny Lingham, CEO of Gyft. “You can now conveniently sync any gift card from your Gyft wallet with Passbook. We are also powering our retail partners to connect directly with Passbook through Gyft’s digital gift card platform."

Gyft recently debuted its mobile app as a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist, launching with more than 200 major retailers, including Amazon.com, Brookstone, Lowe’s, and Sephora.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City has released a new paper entitled "New Person-to-Person Payment Methods: Have Checks Met Their Match?".

Compared with person-to-person payments via cash or checks, new methods now available to consumers offer significant advantages but still leave gaps in service, suggesting a role the Federal Reserve could play to facilitate innovation in this area.

The full paper is available here.

LevelUp has announced the availability of 'LevelUp White Label' which lets merchants created a fully-branded mobile payments app that lets them use their own loyalty program.

“Lots of our partners have great brands, epic brands with some serious cult followings. They've told us they want LevelUp’s unique combination of mobile payments and loyalty-driving campaigns, but they've got to make it their own,” said LevelUp's Seth Priebatsch. “LevelUp White Label gives them exactly that. The full functionality of LevelUp on the backend, with a fully branded experience on the front end.”

The Smart Card Alliance Payments Council has announced availability of an updated white paper, “Card Payments Roadmap in the United States: How Will EMV Impact the Future Payments Infrastructure?” with new information for 2012.

Within the last year, the four major U.S. payment brands have announced harmonized key milestones for U.S. implementation of EMV. The white paper, an extensive update from the first version released in February 2011, contains all of the important details of the milestones and recommended implementation guidelines from American Express, Discover, MasterCard and Visa in one document for the first time.

On the web:

• PassWallet Brings Apple's Passbook to Android - Lifehacker
• Carrier Billing: MACH Integrates With Vodafone, EE, Three And O2 In UK - TechCrunch

On the wires:

• NimbleCommerce Launches the First Ever Deal-Sharing Network
• Green Dot Invites Consumers to “Break Free” with National TV Ad Campaign
• Sage Introduces a Browser-Based Payment Terminal With Dynamic Couponing and Messaging
• NRF Says Swipe Reform Saving Up to $18 Million/Day