Electronic Payments Week articles from January 2005

Electronic Payments Week archives from January 2005

Outlook 2005: Few Tangible Technological Changes In Payments, But Some Regulatory Updates and Big Mergers Expected.
January 4, 2005... Payments are an abstract of commerce--the exchange of value probably predates even the oldest professions. So it is no wonder that change is coming to the payments industry slowly. After all, even in the cyber age, real change takes time. ...

Alleged Riggs-CIA Connection Muddies Waters.(Central Intelligence Agency)(Riggs Bank N.A.)
January 4, 2005... Long-standing connections between Riggs Bank and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) may complicate the ongoing prosecutions arising from last summer's Riggs Bank money-laundering scandals, and also delay the Riggs-PNC Financial Corp. merger,...

Microsoft Hands In Its 'Passport'.(Microsoft Corp.'s Microsoft Passport marketing discontinuation)(Brief Article)
January 4, 2005... Microsoft Corp. acknowledged last week that it was giving up marketing its Passport product, which was supposed to have been its entree into ecommerce. The confession came after eBay, one of Passport's earliest supporters, said on its site...

Court Rules Wires Have To Go Through.(Monter filed lawsuit against Genex)(Brief Article)
January 4, 2005... A New York State appeals court ruled that third parties cannot attach wire payments after the Treasury Department lifts a block on the payments. The ruling is the result of a lawsuit filed by Genex, a Serbian construction company that, in...

Capital One Sued For Alleged False Advertising.
January 4, 2005... Capital One Bank and its Capital One FSB unit are being sued by the State of Minnesota for lying, according to the state, about what the big credit card company has been calling its fixed-rate credit cards. The companies, according to the Dec....

Hacker Has Book Thrown At Him.(Brian A. Saledo, Lowe's Corp. hacker sentenced to 108 months in prison)(Brief Article)
January 4, 2005... Brian A. Saledo, a hacker who pleaded guilty to hacking into the Lowe's Corp. computers and stealing credit card numbers, was sentenced in U.S. Court in Charlotte, N.C., on Dec. 15 to 108 months in the slammer. The longest previous federal...

Who's Who.(Brief Article)
January 4, 2005... * Richard W. Fisher was named president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas effective April 4. Fisher succeeds Robert D. McTeer, Jr., who resigned to be chancellor of the Texas A&M University System. Fisher was vice chairman of Kissinger...

New To Market.
January 4, 2005... * The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC expanded its educational programs for payments professionals into a national operation conducted in classrooms and on the Web, called The Payments University. Covering payments operations like checks, wire,...

The Checklist.
January 4, 2005... DISCOVER CARD [MWD] This unit of Morgan Stanley & Co. reported net income of $900 million, and income before taxes of $279 million, on revenues of $1.286 billion for the fourth quarter of 2004, compared with net income of $811 million, and...

Shift to Electronic Payments Hastens Asian Tsunami Relief.
January 11, 2005... When the Asian tsunami disaster began to monopolize the world's front pages, the last thing anybody would have thought of would have been electronic payments. But the shift of payments from paper to electronic and especially the growing...

Hackers Stalk Wireless Paths To Intercept Payments.
January 11, 2005... Millions of dollars are being plucked out of thin air by hackers who are intercepting wireless computer communications--even encrypted microwave communications. They are dispensing with the task of slipping past well-defended corporate portals...

Card Companies' Tsunami Relief Hazy.(donations)(Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunami, 2004)
January 11, 2005... With tsunami relief front and center on every news outlet, it was just a matter of time before the major credit cards got into the act. And sure enough, by the end of last week, American Express, Visa, MasterCard and Discover had, in some way...

WAMU Shakeup Highlights Mortgage Weakness.(Washington Mutual Inc.'s Deanna W. Oppenheimer resigns)
January 11, 2005... The sudden resignation last week of Deanna W. Oppenheimer, president of $289 billion Washington Mutual Inc.'s retail banking unit, is leaving observers wondering if it was because she didn't get the bank's chief operating officer job, which...

Ernst & Young Fined.
January 11, 2005... Also lost in the media shuffle was the $125 million fine paid by Ernst & Young, LLP (E&Y) for what federal banking regulators said was sloppy auditing work at Superior Bank, FSB. Superior, a small bank once owned by Chicago's Pritzker...

Who's Who.(Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland's appointments)(Brief Article)
January 11, 2005... * The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland made a number of appointments for 2005. Robert W. Mahoney, retired chairman of Diebold, Inc., was reappointed chairman of the board. Charles E. Bunch, president of PPG Industries, Inc., was reappointed a...

FinCEN's BSA Direct Could Counteract Shady Transactions.(U.S. Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network)
January 11, 2005... Tucked into a year-end appropriations bill is $60 million in new funding for FinCEN, including $5 million for a project called BSA Direct, which could help law enforcement decipher millions of suspicious activity reports (SARs). FinCEN is the...

New To Market.(Reflex Security Inc. improved Interceptor intrusion prevention)
January 11, 2005... * Bank of America Corp. has been ordered by a California court to pay $284 million to customers who were charged overdraft fees on accounts that receive direct deposits of Social Security checks. Aside from the $284 million, the court said BofA...

The Checklist.(banking and financial service companies deals)
January 11, 2005... ACE Cash Express, Inc. [AACE] This check-cashing and short-term loan company says it opened 23 new stores since Oct. 1, opened 17 franchise stores and, in five transactions, bought 43 other stores for $11.7 million. ACE now has 1,327...

Chase Grabs the Brass Ring; Vastera Buy Spells Success.
January 18, 2005... When J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. announced Jan. 6 that it was buying Vastera Inc. for about $129 million, what it really said was that it had found a way for banks qua banks to reintermediate themselves. Vastera by itself won't do this; it's a...

Card Companies Unify Transmission Standards.(payment card industry data security standard ( PCIDSS ))
January 18, 2005... The major credit card companies have agreed and are implementing a single standard to be used to send credit data. The standards, called the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard [PCIDSS], are designed to enhance security by eliminating...

Supreme Court Clarifies Money Laundering Crimes.(Brief Article)
January 18, 2005... The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last Tuesday that the government need not prove that a defendant committed an overt act in a money laundering conspiracy in order to convict them of money laundering. The ruling let stand a Department of Justice...

OCC Spanks Another Miami Bank.(Office of the Comptroller of the Currency)(Office of the Comptroller of the Currency )
January 18, 2005... Eagle National Bank of Miami is the latest Florida bank to sign a consent decree with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency arising from a bank examination. The conditions that the $270 million bank agreed to make it sound as though, as...

Russian Hackers Using Kids.(Brief Article)
January 18, 2005... Four Australian high school kids have been busted for working for a global Internet scam, coming out of Russia, which stole money out of people's bank accounts. The scam slipped Trojan horses into people's computers that recorded the keystrokes...

Walgreen's Reconsiders Amex Ban.(Brief Article)
January 18, 2005... In a good example of the credit card wars' entertainment value, Walgreen Co. says it was all a big mistake and it will keep taking American Express cards after all. The big drugstore chain said in December it was through with Amex because...

Identity Thief Gets 14 Years.(Brief Article)
January 18, 2005... A 35-year-old man who helped conduct one of the biggest identity theft cases on record last week got 14 years in federal prison, and forfeited $1 million in proceeds, after pleading guilty in a Long Island federal court to conspiracy, wire...

IT Outlook for 2005.(Brief Article)
January 18, 2005... Gartner Inc. says it expects modest growth in IT budgets of about 2.5 percent, according to its annual survey of 1,300 chief information officers. Those CIOs represent some $57 billion in spending authority in over 30 countries. The days...

Private-Label Card Market Wanes.
January 18, 2005... Retailer-issued private label credit cards can be traced back to when general store owners gave their customers credit until harvest. But their day may be waning, thanks to their offspring--the co-branded credit card--Regan Wong, a TowerGroup...

New To Market.(financial services industry news)
January 18, 2005... * Cyota says its second annual financial institution online fraud survey, conducted in November, found that: 50% of account holders have gotten at least one phishing email, compared to less than 25% last April--100% growth in just six months;...

The Checklist.(financial companies' news)
January 18, 2005... City National Corp. [CYN] The parent company of California's $14.2 billion City National Bank reported net income of $206.3 million, or $4.04 per share, on revenues of $788.5 million for 2004, compared with net income of $186.7 million, or...

First Data Cultivates Mobile Payment; U.S. Launch Uncertain.
January 26, 2005... In a major move validating the idea of making payments from your cell phone, First Data Corp. said last week it was making Nandita Bakhshi managing director of a new division, First Data Mobile Solutions. She joined First Data from Bank of...

Collateral Damage: Check Businesses Must Change, Or Die.
January 26, 2005... The new Check 21 regulation is still more of a topic than a reality, but it's already causing real dislocations in the businesses that continue to support checks. Pink slips are on the way. On Jan. 10, for instance, AirNet Systems Inc., a...

Wal-Mart, Discover Launch Co-Branded Card...(Discover Financial Corp., Wal-Mart Stores Inc., partnership)(Brief Article)
January 26, 2005... In what had probably been the most widely anticipated--if well-hidden--event in recent credit-card history, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. marched into the territory of general-purpose credit cards. The mass marketer is joining with Discover Financial...

...While Amex Class Action Suit Expands.(American Express)(Brief Article)
January 26, 2005... And speaking of credit cards and lawsuits, a class-action suit brought by Midwestern merchants against American Express has been expanded to include CitiGroup and MBNA Corp. The suit, brought by Friedman & Shube of New York, hopes to force...

Hacker Burrows Deep Into T-Mobile.(Nicholas Jacobson, T-Mobile USA, case)
January 26, 2005... Yet another 21-year-old hacker has run rings around some of the best computer security minds in the business, in this case demonstrating how vulnerable the infant mobile payments business can be. According to court papers filed in U.S....

TSYS Acquires Vital In Its Entirety.(Vital Processing Services )(Brief Article)
January 26, 2005... Global payments provider TSYS bought the 50 percent of Vital Processing Services it didn't already own from Visa USA, which had founded Vital along with TSYS in 1996. Terms were not disclosed. Vital will become a wholly owned unit of TSYS,...

Wells Fargo Launches Integrated Site.(Brief Article)
January 26, 2005... Wells Fargo & Co. opened a new Web site last week that allows its customers shuffle funds between their bank and brokerage accounts. It includes Morningstar ratings and mutual-fund profiles. (Contact: Wells Fargo & Co., 415/396-7668) ...

Citibank's Wriston Dies At 85.(Brief Article)
January 26, 2005... Walter B. Wriston, who as much as anyone is responsible for turning the sleepy world of traditional banking into today's aggressive, technology-heavy institution, died last week of pancreatic cancer. He was 85. When Wriston first sat down...

Who's Who.(Appintments and resignations)(Brief Article)
January 26, 2005... * Stanley Fisher resigned as vice chairman of CitiGroup Inc. to become governor of Israel's Central Bank. (Contact: CitiGroup Inc., 212/559-9446) * Paul Bodart, executive vice president of The Bank of New York, was elected to the boards of...

Size Matters: Small Community Banks Thrive in Modern Banking Climate.
January 26, 2005... At a time when big banks are facing problems finding ways to stay afloat in a Darwinian world, community banks are thriving. New ones are popping up all the time and, according to observers, they are taking market share, retail deposits and...

Financial Reports.(financial services earnings)(Illustration)
January 26, 2005... 2004 Corporate Financial Results Net Income Company 2004 2003 AmSouth Bancorp $623.5M $626.1M Bank of America...