Menekse Gencer of PayPal blogs on the PayPal Blog about PayPal's mobile money transfer application now available on Sprint phones.

Celent has published a new report titled 'The Would-Be Disruptors: New Technologies in the Remittance Space' that 'examines the application of technology that holds the promise of making cross-border remittances less expensive, quicker, more convenient, and more secure than traditional low-tech remittance models.'   » Continue Reading

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.

Curiously, over the weekend the second most popular article on Payments News was one written way back in late March of 2006 as the official launch of PayPal Mobile was nearing. The article, titled "PayPal in the Air! - A Look At PayPal Mobile", was written before PayPal's official launch of the mobile payments service - that happened a few weeks later on April 6, 2006. That was just over two years ago.   » Continue Reading

Citibank has announced that it will make Obopay’s mobile person-to-person payment service available to Citibank checking account customers on a trial basis. Citibank says it is the first U.S. retail bank to trial an integrated mobile payment service.   » Continue Reading

Trumpet Mobile and RadioShack Corporation have announced the nationwide availability of Trumpet Mobile's prepaid wireless services at more than 4,300 RadioShack neighborhood locations. "As one of the fastest growing prepaid wireless service providers, Trumpet Mobile is a pioneer in the prepaid mobile money transfer market, which allows subscribers the unique ability to make Western Union money transfers within the U.S. and to Latin America and the Caribbean from their mobile phones."   » Continue Reading

Obopay has announced the launch of its instant money transfer service in India through an alliance between wholly-owned subsidiary Obopay India and YES BANK, an Indian private sector bank.   » Continue Reading

Obopay has announced that "customers can now use their existing bank accounts to send and receive money via their mobile phone. With Obopay's mobile money transfer, non- customers can pick up payments without signing up for Obopay. These innovations make it easier than ever for any bank customer to conveniently send and receive payments from their mobile phones."   » Continue Reading

Javelin Strategy & Research has published a new report on mobile person-to-person (P2P) payments and transfers that outlines target consumer segments, obstacles and drivers for product adoption, and detailed case studies of three mobile P2P payment models from PayPal, Obopay and mChek. According to the report, most consumers want high-speed transactions, but only one in ten consumers is willing to adopt mobile P2P payment services.   » Continue Reading

Airtel has announced the launch of range of Mobile Commerce solutions including Mobile Money Transfer (MMT), Postpaid Bill Payment and Prepaid Recharge on the mobile phone. Airtel is partnering with ICICI bank, HDFC bank, SBI, Corporation bank and VISA to enable these payments using a solution that has been developed by mChek.   » Continue Reading

In an article titled 'Money is going mobile through phone services', Cassell Bryan-Lowe reports for the Wall St. Journal about Safaricom, a joint venture between Vodafone and Telkom Kenya, that provides person-to-person remittance services in Kenya. According to the article, Vodafone is planning to add India as well as cross-border remittance services between Kenya and the UK.

Dave Bircb blogs about his experience trying to originate a SEPA Credit Transfer (SCT) to from his bank in the UK to a colleague's bank in the Netherlands. "So, in summary, sending 50 euros to Amsterdam in the exciting new world of SEPA took two trips to the bank, cost £15 (ie, a transaction fee of 40%) and took three days. Next time, I'll use PayPal."

The My Money Blog takes a look at Revolution MoneyExchange. "It’s free to send, receive, and withdraw money, but the only funding source allowed is your bank account (no credit cards)." Revolution MoneyExchange's site is here.

CPNI has announced an agreement with PROSA (Promocion y Operacion, S.A. de C.V.), the largest provider of electronic transactions in Latin America, in which PROSA will provide financial institutions in Mexico with the centralized payments processing backbone for CPNI's Phone Authorized Transfer (PAT) mobile payment solutions.   » Continue Reading

Forrester's Michelle de Lussanet has written a new report titled "Person-To-Person Payment Goes Mobile - But P2P Mobile Payment Is A Technology In Search Of A Market". From the abstract: "A number of firms in Western Europe have recently launched payment systems that allow consumers to make person-to-person payments using their mobile phones. Executives at other payment system operators, mobile operators, and banks need not rush to follow suit. We are not convinced that there is a large market for these new systems: Currently P2P supports only well-defined, narrow payment scenarios like mobile airtime prepay top-up of another person's prepay account. Instead, P2P payments are likely to become just one feature within broader mobile banking and mobile payment services."

Ben Charny reports for MarketWatch on the integration of PayPal send money functionality into the latest version of the Skype client software. More details at the Skype Beta blog.

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.   » Continue Reading

Glenbrook's Carol Coye Benson files this report: I spoke on Friday with Barry Campbell, Director of Business Development for Acxsys Corporation and Interac Online, Canada's "credit push" online payment system.   » Continue Reading

"Person to person" online money transfer company, iKobo, Inc. has announced that it completed a $4 million Series C financing round. The funding round was led by Greenhill SAVP, with additional financing support from existing investors, including Total Technology Ventures LLC and Council Ventures.   » Continue Reading

Digital Insight and Metavante have announced agreements that expand their strategic relationship. Under the terms of one new agreement, the partnership will now include NYCE Network real-time payments technology that gives online banking users of Digital Insight client financial institutions the ability to securely conduct inter-institution account-to-account (A2A) funds transfers. A second agreement provides Digital Insight client financial institutions the ability to resell or directly issue stored-value gift cards to their customers through Digital Insight's online banking interface or at their branch.   » Continue Reading

BankServ has announced that, as part of its strategy to enter the growing field of electronic person-to-person payments, it has acquired Magex Managed Payments Platform, a division of financial technology developer Magex Holdings Ltd. The Magex Managed Payments Platform division is the producer of P2P systems that let consumers exchange money over the Internet or using their mobile phones.   » Continue Reading

In a column titled "E-wallets useful, but can be risky, too", Sucheta Dalal writes for The Financial Express from India about action taken 10 days ago by the Reserve Bank of India asking a "leading media organisation which had launched India’s first electronic wallet to “desist” from offering the service."   » Continue Reading

India's Times of Money has introduced Wallet365.com, a person-to-person payment service for consumers in India that "lets you pay anyone, anywhere" via email. As with PayPal, Wallet365 emphasizes safety, saying "it secures you from the dangers of online credit card fraud." Funds can be loaded into the account from participating banks for free (except ICICI which is charging a 2% fee) or from a credit card for a 2% fee. Fees also apply for sending money and paying bills but not for receiving money from others.

Yahoo! has been issued US Patent No. 7,031,939 for "systems and methods for implementing person-to-person money exchange" based upon a filing dated August 15, 2000.   » Continue Reading

Emory writes: "One thing that may or may not be interesting to you, we use eCount cards with my employer for a rewards-system allowing for employee to employee cash awards." Check out the link for his blog posting on how this P2P reward scheme works.

Carolyn Said reports for the San Francisco Chronicle about hometown startup Prosper.com, the latest person to person lending enabler that is backed by $20 million raised from venture investors Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, Fidelity Ventures and Omidyar Network.   » Continue Reading

Black Lab Mobile has announced the availability of billmycell, a service they describe as enabling consumers to make credit card transfers to any person or business via their cellphone.   » Continue Reading

TextPayMe blogs about the use of their new SMS-based mobile payment service for face-to-face transactions -- such as paying the seller when you're picking up goods you're purchasing from a Craigslist listing -- following mention of the idea in a Search Engine Journal post about Google Payments last Friday.   » Continue Reading

I just stumbled across a posting from late January on the MobileRadicals Blog (from a a collection of mobile researchers based at the Department of Communications at Lancaster University in the UK) titled Mobile Payments - Six Years After WAP.

Rachel Metz reports for Wired News on mobile payments company TextPayMe.   » Continue Reading

Sara Silver reports for the Wall St. Journal on plans by Motorola to add an "M-Wallet" to its cellular phones to enable payment using the phone at POS checkouts and the transfer money to others similarly equipped. According to the story, Motorola plans to distribute the service through wireless carriers who will price and market it to their customers.   » Continue Reading

John Cook of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer blogs about BillMonk, his "startup of the week".

BillMonk's initial service, a hybrid of social networking and personal finance, offers the ability to track (via the website or using mobile phone SMS) what the founders call "social money" - informal debts between friends and family.

Technorati Tags: BillMonk   » Continue Reading

Earlier this month, TextPayMe announced a new text messaging-based service for sending money using mobile phones. The company says it supports deposits from electronic bank transfers or credit cards and supports withdrawals via wire transfer or mailed checks.   » Continue Reading