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May 11th, 2012
Edition #303
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In this Issue
In Other News
This Day in History 1934
Dust Storm Sweeps from Great Plains Across Eastern States
On this day in 1934, a massive storm sends millions of tons of topsoil flying from across the parched Great Plains region of the United States as far east as New York, Boston and Atlanta.
At the time the Great Plains were settled in the mid-1800s, the land was covered by prairie grass, which held moisture in the earth and kept most of the soil from blowing away even during dry spells. By the early 20th century, however, farmers had plowed under much of the grass to create fields. The U.S. entry into World War I in 1917 caused a great need for wheat, and farms began to push their fields to the limit, plowing under more and more grassland with the newly invented tractor. The plowing continued after the war, when the introduction of even more powerful gasoline tractors sped up the process. During the 1920s, wheat production increased by 300 percent, causing a glut in the market by 1931.
That year, a severe drought spread across the region. As crops died, wind began to carry dust from the over-plowed and over-grazed lands. The number of dust storms reported jumped from 14 in 1932 to 28 in 1933. Click here to read more.
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Wallet, Wallet Everywhere: Making Sense of the Mobile Payment Wars
5/11/12 TIME  
There’s a cold war going on in the technology world. As smartphones become ubiquitous and online shopping grows, tech companies and payment companies are arming themselves for battle over how people pay for things. Their shared goal is to take a hammer to the inconvenience of traditional paper and plastic payments. They want our smartphones to act as electronic credit cards using near-field communication technology. They want online stores to accept a login and password instead of full payment details. Eventually, even our computers may act as payment kiosks, so we can press a phone against a laptop to make purchases online.
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MasterCard Unveils 'Digital Wallet' Network
5/08/12 Financial Times
MasterCard Inc. (MA) is ratcheting up the battle for control of consumers' "digital wallets" with a new service that aims to simplify how consumers pay for goods online and on mobile devices, an area that rival Visa Inc. (V) is already targeting. The Purchase, N.Y.-based credit-card company said Monday it is rolling out PayPass Wallet Services, a suite of software products for use by merchants, card-issuing banks and their customers. AMR Corp.'s (AAMRQ) American Airlines and Barnes & Noble Inc. (BKS) are among the first merchants that will incorporate the service into their websites by including a "PayPass checkout" button on their sites, MasterCard said. American Airlines will also integrate the technology into its mobile application.
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Isis to Link Amex's Digital Wallet to Its Own
5/10/12 BTN
Why stop at just one digital wallet? American Express (AXP) plans to allow users of its digital wallet, Serve, to link their account to another digital wallet, Isis, a venture of several U.S. carriers. Amex plans to first link its consumer and Open small-business cards to the Isis mobile payments system. All of these payment products will be linked to Isis this year. Amex's Isis deal is an indication that payment products cannot stand alone, the New York company says.
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VeriFone Taking Aim At Square
5/09/10 ISO&Agent
When Square Inc. launched its mobile card reader in 2009, VeriFone Systems Inc. was on its heels with PayWare Mobile. Now the terminal maker’s ready to roll out another rival to Square with a product it calls Sail. Whereas VeriFone designed PayWare Mobile for use off the shelf, it designed Sail for small businesses with technical savvy. It plans to offer Sail with open-source software that developers can adapt to work with merchants’ inventory software. Merchants also may use Sail as is, just like VeriFone’s earlier product. Square similarly designed its product for merchant use right out of the box.
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It's Apple vs Google vs. Everyone in the Mobile Payments War
5/09/12 Forbes
In a prior post on the topic of mobile payments, I made the case that the mobile wallet will become the foundation of a new, disruptive “payment Operating System.” The watershed moment will come when Apple includes Near Field Communication (NFC) hardware in its next iPhone and introduces the iWallet as part of iOS. Now to the trillion dollar question: who will be the resulting winners and the losers in mobile payments? At stake are huge pots of gold accruing to the winners.
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Durbin Supports Retailers Seeking Revamped Debit Regulations
5/10/12 Digital Transactions
U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, author of the now-famous amendment bearing his name that upended the debit card industry, made a figurative trip to court this week to show his support for retailers challenging the Federal Reserve Board’s final rule implementing his provision in 2010’s Dodd-Frank Act. In a friend of the court brief filed with the retailer lawsuit, the Illinois Democrat argues that the Fed exceeded its statutory authority in regulating debit card interchange and failed to properly implement the amendment’s network-exclusivity provisions.
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Dip in Jobless Claims Eases Worries Over Hiring
5/10/12 The New York Times
New claims for unemployment benefits in the United States unexpectedly edged down last week, according to government data Thursday, and the decline could ease some concerns following April's weak employment growth that the labor market was deteriorating. Separately, the government said the United States trade deficit widened more than expected in March.
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Q1 e-Retail Growth Nears Pre-Recession Levels
5/09/12 Internet Retailer
Online retail sales increased about 16.6% in the first quarter, to nearly $44.3 billion compared with $38.0 billion for the same period on 2011, comScore Inc. said today. The Q1 spending marks the tenth consecutive quarter of positive year-over-year growth and sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, the web measurement firm says. “While the economic recovery continues to be painfully slow, the channel shift to e-commerce appears to be accelerating,”
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Money Goes Mobile in Cutting-Edge Tech Tools
5/09/12 Mercury News
Money is going mobile. Money is going social. And thanks to a bounty of new tech tools, saving and spending and even donating your money is going to be more fun than you ever imagined. At FinovateSpring 2012, this week's two-day smorgasbord of cutting-edge financial and banking products, the tantalizing offerings range from "gee-whiz" (Dynamics' programmable credit cards with tiny buttons to toggle between debit and credit) to "game-on" (SaveUp software turns saving and debt payment into a game and a chance to win FREE VACATIONS!). "We turn savings into a game," SaveUp CEO and co-founder Priya Haji said as she went through her seven-minute pitch in front of several hundred bankers, investors and bloggers.
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First Data Releases April 2012 SpendTrend®
5/09/10 First Data
First Data Corporation, a global leader in electronic commerce and payment processing, today released its First Data SpendTrend® analysis for the full month of April 2012 compared to April 2011. SpendTrend tracks same-store consumer spending by credit, signature debit, PIN debit, EBT cards and checks at U.S. merchant locations. Overall year-over-year dollar volume growth was 5.7% in April, down from March’s 8.7% growth. Transaction growth slowed to 5.8% in April, down from 9.3% in March.
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Prepaid Execs Defend Fees As 'So Much Better' Than in 2009
5/09/12 American Banker
Bankers and prepaid card executives defended the industry's much-criticized fees on Wednesday, saying that prices and practices have improved as the industry has matured. "It's gotten so much better than it was three or four years ago," John Barbella, a senior vice president with The Bancorp (TBBK), said during a panel discussion on Wednesday morning.
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Level 3 PCI Compliance Increases Slightly, Even As Its Population Grows
5/09/12 StorefrontBacktalk
The latest PCI compliance stats—out this week—show trivial changes from the prior report, with Level 2 and Level 3 retailers slightly increasing compliance. Level 2 went from 91 percent at the end of December 2011 to 92 percent as of March 31, 2012, and Level 3 also increased by 1 percent, from 58 percent to 59 percent. The 407 largest chains, the Level 1s (processing more than 6 million Visa transactions annually), stayed exactly the same, at 98 percent.
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Cooperate or Lose Out in Mobile Payments
5/07/12 BankThink
I recently introduced the MasterCard Mobile Payments Readiness Index to a group of c-level bankers, and told them that one of our top-level findings is that it's the early days for mobile payments. There was a nearly audible sigh of relief. That was the troubling part. What I quickly attempted to hammer home is that "early days" only means that the time to line up strategy, technology and partnerships is now. The partnerships piece is the most important. The mobile payments train is about to leave the station—and there is a real danger that banks could be left behind.
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The Anti-Groupon? Edo Launches Real-Time Local Offers Platform, Tied To Your Bank Card For Instant Credits
5/08/12 TechCrunch
At the Finovate conference in San Francisco, a company called edo announced the introduction of what it describes as “geocommerce” offers, which, as the name implies, are offers and deals from merchants that are tied to a location. But there’s more to the edo platform than that. The company also targets its offers based on your previous transaction history – not entirely unlike the early stage startup BankOns that Capital One just snapped up yesterday. More importantly, what’s interesting about edo is how those offers work.
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Visa Raises "No Signature" Limit to $50 to Increase Merchant Efficiency & Consumer Convenience
5/07/12 MarketWatch
Visa Inc announced plans to raise its Visa Easy Payment Service "no signature required" limit from $25 to $50 for two key U.S. merchant categories. Starting in October 2012, discount stores and grocery stores/supermarkets in the U.S. can accept Visa cards for transactions up to $50 without requiring a cardholder signature or PIN, or providing a customer receipt unless requested by the cardholder.[1] This change is designed to increase speed at the point-of-sale, cardholder convenience and operational efficiencies for a large number of merchants.
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Visa and Obopay Collaborate for Near Real-Time Electronic Disbursements to Visa Prepaid Cards
5/09/12 BusinessWire
Visa Inc and Obopay, a leading provider of mobile and instant payment solutions for market-leading brands, today announced a collaboration to enable near real-time payment solutions for disbursing electronic funds to a prepaid card. As a result of the agreement, Obopay will offer its partners the ability to disburse funds from their corporate account directly onto a Visa prepaid card which they can provide to a payee. The capability can benefit a range of industries including insurance, payroll, rebates, incentives, business expenses, government disbursements or any other bulk payment need.
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ACH Goes Real-Time with FiSync. Free for Banks and Credit Unions
5/08/12 Dwolla
Dwolla’s FiSync service is something that we’ve been working on for years in some form or another. We released the standard functionality in various forms last year to financial institutions across the country, but none of the iterations offered the most disruptive component: an engine to power real-time transaction of real funds. As of today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve designed a real-time system that solves this problem. Not only does it solve the problem, but we’ve decided to give the answer to your banks and credit unions for free.
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Canada Scrutinizing Visa, MasterCard Fees
5/08/12 The Star
A high-profile battle over how much merchants – and ultimately consumers – pay to use credit cards goes to a long-awaited hearing in Ottawa Tuesday. The federal competition watchdog is alleging that “anti-competitive” behaviour by Visa and MasterCard means Canadians pay $5 billion a year in hidden credit card fees -- among the highest in the world. The bureau wants the tribunal to strike down a credit card company rule requiring merchants who agree to accept one Visa or MasterCard credit card to accept all of them, including premium cards that come with higher merchant fees.
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Apple Starts Testing Mobile Deals & Payments In-House With Pirq Partnership
5/08/12 Cult of Mac
A new deal between Apple and location-based deals startup Pirq, to offer daily food and drink deals to the company’s employees in silicon valley could be a sign of Apple testing the waters with both a deals network and whether such ecommerce options make sense for iPhone users. Pirq operates somewhat like Groupon but with a lot more flexibility.
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HSBC Moves to Contactless as Standard on All UK-Issued Debit Cards
5/09/12 Finextra
HSBC says it will begin the conversion to contactless technology this month, replacing all debit cards that are due to expire from May 2012 with the new chips. Users will be able to use the card to pay for items up to the value of £15 with just a single tap.' This will increase to £20 from 01 June 2012. Barnaby Jenkins, head of cards for HSBC, says: "Contactless technology is an efficient and secure way for customers to pay for goods, with a clear time saving advantage over alternatives.
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