PULSE has announced an agreement with Obopay to enable real-time money transfer capabilities for PULSE financial institution participants.

“Combining our extensive debit network with Obopay’s broad range of mobile money solutions gives consumers a faster and more efficient way to pay with their debit card, while also enabling new revenue generating opportunities for our participants,” said Judith McGuire, Executive Vice President of Product Management at PULSE. “A growing number of mobility-minded consumers require instant payments and transfers. The agreement with Obopay is one way we can help facilitate that for our financial institutions and their account holders.”

The Boston Fed has published a Public Policy Discussion Paper entitled "Account-to-Account Electronic Money Transfers: Recent Developments in the United States".

The paper analyzes the emerging decentralized market in which A2A money transfers are becoming available in the United States and compares it with the A2A market in other countries. The paper constructs analytical examples to explain and evaluate the structure of the emerging U.S. market and discusses possible policy actions that may enhance the use of A2A money transfers in the United States.

Fiserv has announced that the CheckFree RXP money movement platform has been expanded to support account-to-account transfers and same-day bill payments. "These new functionalities integrate with the existing bill payment and person-to-person payment capabilities available through CheckFree RXP to create a robust digital payments suite for financial institutions. While the elements of this suite can be utilized a la carte, they are designed to drive increased transactions when offered together."

peerTransfer has announced peerTransfer Education, "an online payment processing service that provides significant time and cost savings for US-based schools and their international students. peerTransfer enables these savings by collecting funds in students' home currency and offering wholesale foreign exchange rates, along with reduced transaction fees. The result is significant cost savings as compared to traditional banking solutions -- up to thousands of dollars for a single year's tuition."

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."