Over on Payments Views, Glenbrook's Russ Jones blogs about "Who Knows What In Payments?" and the explores whether or not the targeting of ads and offers can be enhanced with insight from payment transaction data. He also looks at what mobile wallets will know about the consumer's purchase behavior.

Over on Payments Views, our sister blog, Glenbrook's Russ Jones shares his thoughts on where POS steering may be headed this year, commenting "several of Glenbrook’s merchant clients are already developing their strategies for rewarding customers that select low cost payment methods at the point of sale."

DataPortability.org, the largest data portability group on the U.S., has recently embraced credit card data portability as one of its key initiative areas.

The Credit Card Data Portability Standard is supported by an opt-in community of electronic payment processing providers (service providers) that agree to provide credit card data and associated transaction information (sensitive data) to an existing merchant upon request in a PCI Compliant manner.

The Payment Cards Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia has released its Spring 2010 Update Newsletter. "This edition of Update features summaries of two conferences sponsored by the Payment Cards Center during the first quarter of 2010. Also in this issue, we feature the Consumer Statistics web pages, which have been gaining in popularity since we first created them earlier this year."

So finds a study by Packaged Facts titled "Consumer Payment Trends in the U.S." which reports that "54% of U.S. adults cite cash as their preferred form of payment". Based upon data from Experian Simmons' Spring 2009 adult consumer survey, the report notes that "68% of American adults have a debit card in their wallet and 67% have a credit card; though only 53% of adults may be considered active credit card users with transactions in the last thirty days."

Chase Card Services has announced it is increasing the cash back rate on its Chase Freedom credit card to 5 percent on popular seasonal spending categories, like home improvement, gas and department stores. READ MORE »

Wired Magazine has published an article titled "From Credit Card to PayPal: 3 Ways to Move Money" that graphically depicts the payments process for a) credit cards, b) iTunes and c) PayPal. Can you guess who's most "frictionless" - according to Wired?

Visa Europe has published a new white paper titled "The Future of Everyday Payments in Europe - Who Cares?".

From the introduction: "Our overriding contention is that, to enable and accelerate further development everyday payments, more innovation will be essential. But we use the term “innovation” in its broadest sense. In some instances a big, sweeping change may be necessary. More often, a small tweak or a minor calibration can pay huge dividends."

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston has published The 2008 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice by Kevin Foster, Erik Meijer, Scott Schuh, and Michael A. Zabek.

From the abstract:

This paper presents the 2008 version of the Survey of Consumer Payment Choice (SCPC), a nationally representative survey developed by the Consumer Payments Research Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and implemented by the RAND Corporation with its American Life Panel. The survey fills a gap in knowledge about the role of consumers in the transformation of payments from paper to electronic by providing a broad‐based assessment of U.S. consumers’ adoption and use of nine payment instruments, including cash.

The average consumer has 5.1 of the nine instruments, and uses 4.2 in a typical month. Consumers make 53 percent of their monthly payments with a payment card (credit, debit, and prepaid). More consumers now have debit cards than credit cards, and consumers use debit cards more often than cash, credit cards, or checks individually. Cash, checks, and other paper instruments are still popular and account for 37 percent of consumer payments.

Most consumers have used newer electronic payments, such as online banking bill payment, but they account for only 10 percent of consumer payments. Security and ease of use are the characteristics of payment instruments that consumers rate as the most important.

In an article titled "Introducing a Twitter for Credit Card Purchases", Don Steinberg writes about Philip Kaplan and his new company Blippy - where you can choose to share your credit card purchase details with friends - or strangers. Kaplan suggests that consumers choose only one of the several credit cards in their typical wallet to make the "social card" - transactions on that card would then be shared via Blippy.

See also last week's TechCrunch article and yesterday's NetBanker article on Blippy.

The fall 2009 edition of the Payment Cards Center Newsletter from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia is now available.

Topics in this issue include coverage of three conferences held by the center in 2009: The Future of Consumer Credit Counseling, Understanding the Housing and Mortgage Markets: What Data Do We Have? What Data Do We Need?, and Recent Developments in Consumer Credit and Payments.

Google Scholar now includes the ability to search for and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts. You can easily find some of the important cases that have affected the US payments industry over the last 25 years including:

• National Bancard Corp.(NaBanco) v. Visa USA, Inc., 779 F. 2d 592 - US: Court of Appeals, 11th Circuit 1986
• US v. Visa USA, Inc., 163 F. Supp. 2d 322 - US: Dist. Court, SD New York 2001
• In re Visa Check/MasterMoney Antitrust Litigation, 280 F. 3d 124 - US: Court of Appeals, 2nd Circuit 2001
• SCFC ILC, Inc. v. Visa USA, Inc., 36 F. 3d 958 - US: Court of Appeals, 10th Circuit 1994
• Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Visa USA, Inc., 396 F. 3d 96 - US: Court of Appeals, 2nd Circuit 2005

The Reserve Bank of India has published Payments Systems in India - Vision 2009-12, a report that outlines several major initiatives that the bank is undertaking with respect to the payment systems in India. Among them is India Card - a domestic card initiative.

Quoting from the report: "The concept of a domestic payment card (India Card) and a PoS switch network for issuance and acceptance of payment cards would be looked into. The need for such a system arises from two major considerations (a) the high cost borne by the Indian banks for affiliation with international card associations in the absence of a domestic price setter (b) the connection with international card associations resulting in the need for routing even domestic transactions, which account for more than 90% of the total, through a switch located outside the country."

In an article titled "New York’s Cabbies Like Credit Cards? Go Figure", Michael M. Grynbaum writes for the New York Times about how New York cabbies have grown to appreciate the benefits of payment card acceptance as they've emerged as "an unlikely savior for New York’s taxi industry." When initially introduced two years ago, cabbies were very unhappy with the requirement to accept cards. According to Grynbaum, all of that has changed.

Over the last few years, we've been watching various acceptance environments abandoning cash and moving to only card-based payments. Perhaps the best examples are the airlines - who moved over a relatively short period to eliminating cash acceptance for meals and drinks purchased in-flight. Now comes word from the Miami Herald in south Florida that Florida's Turnpike is being turned into a cashless toll road. "By February 2011, all cash collection on the Turnpike's southernmost stretch will end, and crews will begin tearing down every toll booth."

ISTS Worldwide, Inc., a retail and payment technology consulting and services organization, has published a new white paper titled "Service Oriented Architecture in Payments". According to the company, this paper is part of a series of white papers ISTS plans to publish around topics related to payments and high transaction low latency systems.

In an article titled "Grocery stores taking check use off shoppers' lists", Jerry Hirsch writes for the Los Angeles Times about grocery stores, including Whole Foods Markets, considering banning the use of personal checks at their stores in favor of only accepting cash and cards. Hirsh quotes a Whole Foods regional vice president who says it "prefers cash, debit cards and credit cards because they can be processed quickly and come with added protections that safeguard the interests of the consumer and the retailer."

Over on his Payment Systems blog, Andy Orrock, COO at On-Line Strategies, shares some insights into transaction times for various payment card transaction times from a large merchant.

I found the time difference between credit and offline debit cards vs. online PIN-based debit cards to be interesting with PIN debit taking 1.6 times longer. Andy shares his explanation of the timing difference in the comments.

Non-cash payment volumes continued to grow in 2008 after an increase of 8.6 percent globally in 2007 to 250 billion transactions, according to the World Payments Report 2009, released today by Capgemini, RBS and Efma. The use of cards continues to be the single strongest driver for this growth with llobal card transactions (credit and debit) growing 14.5% in 2007 and 11.2% in 2008. READ MORE »

FleetCor has announced that it has acquired the UK and Ireland fuel card businesses of Retail Decisions (ReD). The acquisition includes all of ReD’s fuel card operations in the UK and Ireland, including ReD’s network of UK fuel bunkering outlets. READ MORE »

New research from TowerGroup titled "Shuffling the Cards: The Migration of Frugal Consumers and Cautious Lenders to a Debit Card World" finds that "debit cards are far more resilient in the current recessionary economy than credit cards. In less than 15 years, debit card transactions in the United States grew from 1 percent of noncash transactions to more than 50 percent. TowerGroup predicts that debit card transaction volume and card spend will grow through 2015, through the current recession and ensuing economic recovery." READ MORE »

Figures published by The UK Cards Association show that donations to charitable organisations on plastic cards reached £1.19 billion in 2008 – up from £1.01 billion in 2007 – an increase of 18%. In terms of the number of donations made on plastic cards there was an overall increase of 13% from 2007 to 2008. Donations on debit cards increased by 16% (up from 13 million in 2007 to 15.1 million last year) while credit card transactions rose 9% (9.6 million in 2007 to 10.5 million last year). READ MORE »

With yesterday's death of Michael Jackson, purchasers of tickets to his planned London shows originally scheduled to begin in a few weeks will be seeking refunds on their purchases. See this article in todays' Guardian for more information. "Tickets for Jackson's 50-day tour sold out almost immediately when they went on sale in March. More than a quarter of a million people bought tickets..."

This is a nightmare scenario for a merchant acquirer - tickets purchased using credit cards for a future performance that ultimately doesn't happen. This is why merchant acquirers are as concerned about the nature of the goods/services being sold as they are about the merchant itself. It will be interesting to watch as this plays out in the UK.

Over on the American Banker's BankThink blog, Maria Aspan asks what does swing flu have to do with MasterCard's and Visa's financial results? On last week's analysts' calls, both the Visa and MasterCard CEOs were asked about the potential impact.

Link2Gov has announced the availability of businesstaxpayment.com, Link2Gov’s new consolidated business tax payment site. At businesstaxpayment.com, businesses can use credit and debit cards to pay the federal business tax types — multiple variations of Forms 940, 941, 943, 944 and 945 — that have been designated by the Internal Revenue Service as eligible for card-based payments. READ MORE »

The Deloitte Consumer Spending Index rose in February driven by strong growth in real wages and a decline in energy prices. The Index attempts to track consumer cash flow as an indicator of future consumer spending. READ MORE »

The Boston Consulting Group has announced its ninth major study of the payments industry titled "Weathering the Storm: Global Payments 2009" find that "banks must take forceful steps to overcome major challenges to their payments businesses if they are to bolster their overall profitability amid the ongoing financial crisis." READ MORE »

Hitachi Consulting has announced results of the 2008 Study of Consumer Payment Preferences, a nationwide study conducted by BAI Research and Hitachi Consulting sponsored by First Data, MasterCard Worldwide, Metavante, and PULSE. According to the study, "traditional card-based payment methods already have whittled away the base of check transactions in the United States, and are now impacting consumers’ use of cash, with 41 percent of consumers indicating they use cash less often today than they did two years ago." READ MORE »

APACS has released full year 2008 data for payments in the UK . Highlights from the full year’s data include:

• Plastic cards: Total debit and credit card spending was up in 2008 in terms of both value and volume, increasing 6.8% and 7.4% respectively.
• Debit cards dominate card spending - accounting for 73.5% of all plastic card purchase transactions in 2008.
• There were 42.1 million debit cardholders with 75 million debit cards in issue at the end of 2008, compared with 30.1 million credit card holders with 71 million credit cards.
• The number of debit cardholders and cards in issue increased by 1.0% and 4.7% respectively, whereas the number of credit card holders and cards in issue decreased by 2.1% and 2.4% respectively.
• Cheques: During 2008, the number of cheque transactions went down by 10.4%, total values declined by 7.1%.