Terri Bradford, Payments System Research Specialist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, has published a paper titled "A Backward Glance While Looking Forward" looking at some of the new payments products and technologies introduced over the last 10 years: check conversion, person-to-person payments, account aggregation, and electronic bill presentment and payment,

CashEdge has announced the launch of Small Business Me-to-Me Transfers, an online funds transfer product designed specifically to help financial institutions meet the needs of small businesses. READ MORE

In an article titled "The Holdup at Online Banks", Karen Blumenthal writes about why "transferring money between a savings account at one bank and a checking account at another easily takes two days -- and sometimes as many as four."

In a post titled Slightly Faster Payments, Dave Birch blogs about the recently launched Faster Payment Service (FPS) in the UK - noting that "if it is simple -- and I mean really simply -- to instruct an FPS transfer from the phone then it may become an established alternative to some other payment mechanisms." But the best part of the post is his comparison of three possible approaches to settling up lunch with a friend - using FPS, using PayPal, or using the M-PESA approach now live in Kenya.

Marianne Crowe, Vice President, Emerging Payments Research Group, at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, gave a presentation last week titled "Emerging Payments - The Changing Landscape" to the Maine Association of Community Banks and to the New Hampshire Community Bankers Association. Crowe's presentation discusses the growth in debit card payments, the emergence (and potential threats to banks) of decoupled debit cards, prepaid cards for the unbanked, and the use of the Internet for bill payment, ecommerce purchases, and person-to-person or account-to-account money transfers. She also discusses contactless payments and mobile banking.

CashEdge has announced that it executed more than $38 billion in account-to-account transfers in 2007 - "a 300% percent increase over 2006 volume. The transfers were initiated by consumers through CashEdge's money movement solutions that are currently in use at nearly one-third of the top 75 banks in the United States."