MasterCard has announced that starting in 2010, MasterCard's financial institutions will have the capability to offer MasterCard cardholders money transfers from any MasterCard or Maestro card to any other MasterCard or Maestro card. According to MasterCard, "this global card-to-card money transfer service will expand the usability and value of MasterCard products and global payments network by providing its customers with a convenient and cost-effective money transfer platform enabling person-to-person payments and cross-border remittances." READ MORE

Visa has announced that is has extended the global reach of its Visa Money Transfer Service to greater China and the United Arab Emirates, two of the world's most active territories for international remittance. Visa has also launched a new managed service, available initially in Canada and the U.S., that makes it easier for a financial institution to offer Visa Money Transfer to its customers. READ MORE

Fiserv has announced plans for a new personal payments service that it says "will enable individuals to quickly and easily send or receive money person-to-person using their existing online banking relationship. The service will be made available to the more than 3,100 financial institutions in the Fiserv online payment network, linking users with their friends, family, neighbors and colleagues." READ MORE

FIS has announced that it is integrating PayPal's person-to-person (P2P) payment system into the FIS online bill payment application for financial institutions. FIS says that "by integrating paperless P2P functionality into its online bill payment application, FIS empowers banks and credit unions to simultaneously solve for a real consumer need and drive increased transaction activity at the online channel." READ MORE

CashEdge and Firethorn have announced a strategic relationship to bring to market an integrated mobile person-to-person (P2P) payments solution integrating CashEdge's POPmoney P2P payments service with Firethorn's Mobile Wallet solution. According to the companies, "the integrated mobile P2P solution will enable financial institutions to offer their customers the ability to send electronic payments using CashEdge's POPmoney from within their Firethorn mobile banking application, by simply using the email address or mobile phone number of the recipient. This comprehensive mobile P2P banking solution will give consumers greater control over their finances, enabling them to pay other people whenever and wherever they want." READ MORE

Wells Fargo has announced a new mobile customer-to-customer payment option that allows Wells Fargo customers to transfer money to each other via the Wells Fargo Mobile Banking service. READ MORE

CashEdge has announced results from its fourth annual Consumer Online Banking Survey saying it "demonstrated an increasing demand for simple, secure person-to-person (P2P) payment services and the preference by consumers to get these services from their financial institution, rather than an independent service such as PayPal. Conducted annually by CashEdge, the study examines the behavior and preferences of more than 850 consumers nationwide aged 18 years and older who use online banking capabilities." READ MORE

Javelin Strategy & Research has released a new report - Mobile Person-to-Person Payments: Mounting Telco Activity in a Mobile Channel Segment That Financial Institutions Can’t Afford to Lose - that finds that "financial institutions must act now to implement person-to-person mobile solutions before carriers capture the market."

Javelin says "that conditions are growing ripe for potential widespread consumer use of mobile devices to send payments between one another: smartphones are now used by 17 percent of consumers, mobile banking is used by many, and use of the internet for banking and shopping has been common for years. These are just some of the conditions that have created an increased likelihood that consumers will soon begin to use mobile person-to-person (P2P) transfers." READ MORE

On PaymentsViews.com, Glenbrook's Carol Coye Benson takes a look at CashEdge's new POPmoney person-to-person money transfer service. Carol interviewed CashEdge's Neil Platt, SVP & General Manager - US Banking, about the new service.

CashEdge has announced the launch of POPmoney - calling it "the first person-to-person payments (P2P) service for banks, enabling banks to provide simple and secure P2P payments from their online or mobile banking applications." READ MORE

Calling itself "a social media payment platform", http://www.oneTXT.com has announced that it has closed $2 million in Series A financing. "Metamorphic Ventures, New York City, led the round, joined by KPG Ventures of San Francisco, and New York Angels Fund. Individual angel investors also participated, including David Hirsch, formerly at Google; Geoffrey Judge, co-founder of 24/7 Real Media (now part of WPP); Roger Ehrenberg, former president and CEO of DB Advisors, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Deutsche Bank AG; and Mark Michel, formerly Group Head at TD Capital, TD Bank's private equity fund focused on the media and communications sectors." READ MORE

PayPal has announced that, effective today, "you can send money via PayPal to friends and family in the US for free" - as long as the payment is funded from your bank checking account or your PayPal account balance. You can also pay using a credit card and, if so, "you can choose to pay the fee or have the recipient pay it."

CBC News in Canada is reporting that Canada's three main wireless carriers are expected to launch Zoompass on Monday - a new mobile payments service that will be managed by Enstream, a joint venture the three carriers established in 2005. Using software downloaded to the mobile handsets, users will be able to send, receive and request money to/from other mobile phones. According to the company's web site, an accompanying MasterCard PayPass card allows you to make payments from your Zoompass account at POS locations. The Zoompass project involves only the wireless carriers - although partnering with financial institutions might happen in the future. Zoompass already is tweeting about itself on Twitter.

MasterCard has announced that its "fully-integrated, on-demand person-to-person (P2P) mobile payment platform for issuers in the United States is set to go live later this month. With this new platform, MasterCard participating bank customers will be able to offer Mobile MasterCard MoneySend(TM) P2P payments to their customers." READ MORE

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,

Sybase 365 has announced that it will team with Swisscontact, the Swiss Foundation for Technical Cooperation, to provide development of Mobile Money Transfer (MMT) and Mobile Money for the Unbanked (MMU) services in emerging markets. READ MORE

Western Union has introduced a new way to send money within the U.S. using its prepaid card platform coupled with an Overnight Home Delivery service featuring Western Union's new MoneyWise Visa prepaid card. READ MORE

As mentioned earlier by Reuters, Revolution Money has announced it has received $42 million in Series C funding from a Goldman Sachs affiliate (a new investor), as well as AOL co-founder Case, Revolution Money Chairman Ted Leonsis, former Charles Schwab CEO David Pottruck, former JP Morgan Vice Chairman David Golden, Citigroup Inc. and Morgan Stanley. Here's a link to the official press release from the company. READ MORE

New research from TowerGroup finds that the gross dollar volume (GDV) of the U.S. noncash person-to-person (P2P) market in 2008 was $1.1 trillion in over 3 billion transactions. Checks are in decline, but they remain the most significant person-to-person payment method, amounting to over $1 trillion of the noncash P2P payments volume. READ MORE

TwitPay, the Twitter-based person-to-person payments service, has announced that it's exiting its beta phase and will be moving "real money" starting today using Amazon Payments.

Working with Amazon Payments, we’ve built a new version of Twitpay that means we don’t have to be the middle-man for your cash. That’s good for you as a user because you don’t have to trust us with your money, you just have to trust Amazon. It’s good for us as a service because it allows us to focus on adding new features and focus on the core of our business."

India's mChek, a mobile payments and security company, has developed mobile banking and payments technology that it is applying to microfinance applications and mass banking in a pilot with Grameen Koota, a microfinance institution in India. In a series of videos, mChek introduces the service, demonstrates how it works and shares some initial results.

If you're interested in learning more about mChek's pilot results and its work with the bottom of the economic pyramid, contact Valerie Rozycki at Valerie@mchek.com. READ MORE

Writing on the NetBanker blog, Jim Bruene takes a look at WaMu's new Send Direct funds transfer service powered by Cambridge, Massachusetts-based AliasWire. For a 2% fee, WaMu credit cardholders can send money to almost any other US bank account and can be initiated via the website, an SMS message to a specific short code, or a telephone call to a toll-free number. Bruene writes: "It's a cool service. It will be interesting to see if Chase continues the service as they assimilate the WaMu credit card portfolio. "

On Web Worker Daily, Mike Gunderloy takes a look at Twitpay, described as "a simple way to send payments via Twitter." A Twitpay account is funded via PayPal in amounts between $10 and $49.99. Twitpay's FAQ page says that the service was created by a team at the Atlanta Startup Weekend.

In late September, RBC Royal Bank in Canada announced the launch of a trial of a text message-based mobile payment service called RBC Mobex. We recently heard from a colleague in Canada who's delighted with the service. READ MORE

Last week, RBC Royal Bank announced that it is testing a new service, RBC Mobex Mobile Payment Service, that "allows users to easily and securely send and receive money instantly using a text message on their mobile phone."

RBC is doing several smart things here - announcing a new person-to-person service that's incrementally useful - not the "be all, end all" mobile payments service. They're making it easy to participate and doing some smart adaptive risk management too. The technology for the new service is being provided by paybox, a German mobile payments solutions company. Read on for details. READ MORE

CashEdge has introduced Intelligent Money Movement -- what the company calls "an enhanced version of the Company's money movement platform that provides consumers and small businesses simple, seamless access to conduct electronic money movement through online and mobile banking applications." READ MORE

Revolution Money has announced the introduction of the MoneyExchange RevolutionCard, a PIN-based reloadable card that enables free online person-to-person (P2P) payments to other accountholders, ATM access and retail store purchases -- from a single account. READ MORE

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.

eCommerce and mobile commerce solution provider, Mpayy, Inc. has announced that it has closed its Series B financing led by US Bancorp with participation from a number of private investors. READ MORE

MasterCard has announced an agreement with Obopay "to offer a fully-integrated on-demand person-to-person mobile payment service in the United States. The service, offered via MasterCard MoneySend, will give new and existing MasterCard issuing customers the ability to provide an innovative mobile payments service to their MasterCard cardholders on all credit, debit and prepaid MasterCard-branded products." READ MORE