Electronic Payments Week articles from December 2004

Electronic Payments Week archives from December 2004

First Data Corp. Consolidates Payments Processing Position.
December 7, 2004... When First Data Corp. was starting out in life in 1971 as a processing subsidiary for an Omaha-based credit card association, America's banks occupied the sweet spot in the financial world: Whether you were a giant corporation or one of its...

'Phishing' Threatens Electronic Payments.
December 7, 2004... Depending on whom you ask, "phishing" is either an overblown fad, or a knife in the heart of e-commerce. Estimates of losses from the identity theft scam released this year have ranged from TowerGroup's $135 million to Gartner Group's $2.4...

BoNY May Escape Fraud Indictment.(Bank of New York)
December 7, 2004... Reports that The Bank of New York (BoNY) has run afoul of the law seem greatly exaggerated. Last week, the business press reported that BoNY was negotiating with the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York to avoid criminal...

OCC Stonewalls On Bank's Shady Background.(Office of the Comptroller of the Currency)
December 7, 2004... This is a story about possible crime, official stonewalling, and political muscle in the marble halls of Washington. Electronic Payments Week has submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Office of the Comptroller of the...

Checks v. ACH: The Facts.(automated clearing house)(Brief Article)
December 7, 2004... According to the Fed, commercial check volume cleared by the Bank declined 5.5% last quarter. This was the fifth straight declining quarter for the Fed's check-clearing operations. Quarterly volume is the lowest on record dating back to 1989....

Who's Who.
December 7, 2004... * John C. Pollok was promoted to chief operating officer of SCBT Financial Corp. and South Carolina Bank and Trust, NA from president of the company's Mortgage Banc unit. Pollack was part of the original management team that started the $1.3...

How Can Treasurers And Banks Navigate Today's Turbulent Seas?
December 7, 2004... For treasurers and the financial suppliers that work for them, these are tough times. Whether or not their companies are global, giant forces are challenging them to find ways to free up capital and maintain earnings per share, and their...

New To Market.
December 7, 2004... * MassMutual Financial Group bought Barings Asset Management from Holland's ING Group for an undisclosed sum last month. The deal gives MassMutual, which has vastly expanded itself from a mere insurance company to a widely diversified financial...

The Checklist.
December 7, 2004... Barclays PLC [BCS] This big British bank closed on its acquisition of Juniper Financial Corp., a credit card issuer with about $1.4 billion in receivables, from CIBC. Gary Hoffman, Barclaycard chief executive, will become chairman of...

Paper's Days Are Numbered, Says FED Payments Study.(Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta)
December 14, 2004... As anybody who's been processing payments will tell you, the days of paper payments are pretty much over. But buried in the 2004 Federal Reserve Payments Study, just released by the Fed's Financial Services Policy Committee, is yet another...

Wal-Mart's Payments Strategy Comes Under the Microscope.
December 14, 2004... No company with $256.3 billion in net sales can avoid scrutiny, whether it likes it or not; and that certainly includes Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the famously secretive retailing giant. Since the company handles a payments stream larger than...

Fidelity National Has A Busy Week.(Fidelity National Financial Corp. signs letter of content for selling its securities)
December 14, 2004... Fidelity National Financial Corp. signed a letter of intent last Wednesday to sell a combined 25 percent of the company's Fidelity Information Services (FIS) unit to a joint venture of Thomas H. Lee Partners, L.P. and the Texas Pacific Group....

Turmoil At Carreker.(Carreker Corp., Mike Hansen )
December 14, 2004... Carreker Corp. may be going through a crisis. As Electronic Payments Week was going to press, the Dallas-based company casually mentioned, in a twosentence announcement buried at the bottom of a new hire press release, the company said...

AFP Opposing NACHA Return Fees.(Association of Financial Professionals, National Automated Clearing House Association)
December 14, 2004... The Association of Financial Professionals (AFP) came out against NACHA's proposed fee schedule for network returned entries last week. As reported in Electronic Payments Week Oct. 12, the new fee schedule covers automated clearing house...

File Under "Market Forces".(MBNA Corp.)(Brief Article)
December 14, 2004... MBNA Corp., which had been switching some of its MasterCard and Visa cardholders to its new American Express cards by just mailing them the new cards, suddenly announced Friday that it was all a big mistake, and from now on would ask customers...

Who's Who.(appointments)(Brief Article)
December 14, 2004... * Charles Gavin, Jeff Hughes, Ingmar Leliveld, Darin Yug and Milan Sallaba were named partners at DiamondCluster International, Inc. Sallaba is based in London; the others are U.S. based. Gavin is focused on capital markets and credit card...

PayPal, Paymentech Go For A Payday.(signing of marketing agreements)
December 14, 2004... Paymentech LP and eBay's PayPal unit signed a joined marketing agreement Dec. 1 that gives PayPal access to Paymentech's customer base for marketing purposes, greatly extending PayPal's penetration of the online merchant space and potentially...

New To Market.(financial services)
December 14, 2004... * Three small banks, Country Bank for Savings of Ware, Mass., the Savings Bank of Danbury, Conn., and the Greater Buffalo Savings Bank, N.Y., are using item-imaging technology from Open Solutions Inc. The two New England banks are operating...

The Checklist.(Ditronics Financial Services)
December 14, 2004... The BISYS Group, Inc. [BSG] This vendor says its subsidiary, BISYS Fund Services, Inc., is responding to an SEC investigation related to the commission's investigation into the mutual funds business that began in early 2004. The SEC is...

U.S. May Be Falling Behind Europe in Payments Evolution.
December 21, 2004... The United States is finding itself responding to Europe, instead of the other way around, for the first time since World War II. And we find ourselves adopting this unaccustomed posture because of developments in, among other places, as arcane...

First Skirmishes in Amex/Visa/Mastercard War Triggered.(American Express)
December 21, 2004... Open warfare has broken out between American Express and its main rivals, Visa USA and MasterCard International. No sooner had American Express announced Dec. 13 that CitiGroup would be issuing Amex credit cards by year-end 2005, Walgreens,...

Oracle Seeks 'More Critical Mass'.(buying PeopleSoft is one of strategies to gain market share)(Brief Article)
December 21, 2004... Now that Oracle Corp. has assimilated PeopleSoft in what had probably been the least decorous hostile takeover in memory, Larry Ellison's empire says it's trained its photon torpedoes on the banking industry. PeopleSoft, which had been...

Lawsuit Targets Check Imaging Patents.(Brief Article)
December 21, 2004... In case you've lost hope for any more entertainment on the corporate front, along comes Claudio Ballard and his check-imaging suits against JP Morgan Chase & Co., among others. If Ballard wins, he could be awarded fees from every bank using...

More Complications for iBill.(deal between Care Concepts 1 Inc and Penthouse International)
December 21, 2004... The long and very involved deal between iBill, Care Concepts 1 Inc. and Penthouse International has left iBill on the hook for about $10 million in breakup fees. Inspection of the documents, though, shows clearly that since iBill will remain...

NACHA Says ARC Returns Lowest ACH Debit.(National Automated Clearing House Association, accounts receivable conversion, automated clearing house)(Brief Article)
December 21, 2004... The National Automated Clearing House Association (NACHA) says accounts receivable conversion (ARC) transactions are the highest-quality automated clearing house (ACH) transactions, according to its data. ARC is growing faster than any...

Who's Who.(Brief Article)
December 21, 2004... * T. Gary Rogers, chairman and CEO of Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream Holdings, Inc., was appointed to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco's board of directors by the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors. He's a member and former chairman of the...

Banking on The Future: Free Electronic Bill Pay.
December 21, 2004... Free electronic bill pay has been neglected by the banking world for lo these many years, but it may finally come into its own if banks begin to see its virtues. The established data supports the tactic, and some banks have already employed it...

New To Market.
December 21, 2004... * The National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance (NCFTA) has created a central repository for information to help fight phishing frauds, www.digitalphishnet.org, which is designed to report phishing attempts aimed at members' customers. The...

The Checklist.
December 21, 2004... Capital One Financial Corp. [COF] Capital One is buying eSmartloan, an online home equity and mortgage lender, from the National Bank of Kansas City and eSmartloan management, for $155 million in cash. A related escrow company owned by...