Jane Larson writes for the Arizona Republic about the acquisition of EFD/eFunds Corp. by Fidelity National Information Services announced last week and what that might mean for jobs in the Scottsdale headquarters of EFD.

Fidelity National Information Services and EFD/eFunds have announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement whereby FIS will acquire EFD in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $1.8 billion.

American Express and eFunds Corporation have announced "a global, multi-year strategic partnership in which eFunds will provide processing services for the American Express portfolio of prepaid cards."

eFunds has announced it is partnering with IBM to deliver new payments management solutions and a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) framework to banking and financial services clients. According to the companies, "the partnership will help global customers transform business processes and capitalize on emerging opportunities quickly in a rapidly changing payments market."

eFunds International Limited has announced that it will be working with LINK Interchange Network Ltd., the payments processor whose infrastructure powers the UK's real-time online ATM network, to provide the core functionality for the new Faster Payments Service (FPS) to deliver real-time funds transfer from one bank account to another.

eFunds Retail Solutions, formerly ClearCommerce, has announced eFunds RAPIDReviewer, a new workflow and data management solution that helps Internet retailers improve the performance and efficiency of their manual order review process for suspicious transactions.

eFunds has announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire prepaid and stored value provider WildCard Systems, Inc. for an upfront payment of $228.8 million plus an earnout of up to $58.8 million.

Visa USA today announced the addition of a new layer of technology to help its Member financial institutions reduce application fraud losses and account takeover fraud. The new fraud fighting effort is being developed through an association with Chex Systems, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of eFunds Corporation, and will only be available through Visa to its card-issuing Members.

eFunds has announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire ClearCommerce, a privately held provider of fraud prevention and payment processing solutions for card not present transactions, for an initial purchase price of $19.4 million.

eFunds has announced that it is partnering with WildCard Systems to deliver a single source for both EFT and stored value processing capabilities.