Electronic Payments Week articles from June 2005

Electronic Payments Week archives from June 2005

EU Constitutional Woes Not The Only Threat to The Euro.(euro currency in crisis)
June 7, 2005... Can you have a currency without a nation? Perhaps not. Despite blithe reassurances that the euro is independent of politics, politicians in major European Union (EU) economies began raising the specter of a funeral for the euro...

Payments Security Imperiled By Modern Mathematics.
June 7, 2005... The public-private key infrastructure protecting electronic payments may be on the verge of a sea-change. Academics are closing in on proving a long-dead mathematician's hypothesis, which if proven threatens the foundation for modern...

N.Y. Fed Asks Firms What They Really Want.(Federal Reserve Bank of New York)
June 7, 2005... The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has issued the results of a two-year study seeking to find out what corporations really want when it comes to payments--something more banks might learn from. The paper, "Improving Business Payments by...

BofA Gets On The Trade Logistics Bandwagon.(Bank of America)
June 7, 2005... Fully six months after J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. acquired Vastera and got into bed with Xign Corp. (see Electronic Payments Week, Jan. 18), thereby reintermediating itself into the payments stream of international trade, Bank of America (BofA)...

Bank of Australia moves to publicize interchange.(Brief Article)
June 7, 2005... The Reserve Bank of Australia, which has already driven down credit card interchange dramatically, has decided to leave the world of online bill pay alone. At its May 20 meeting, the Bank's Payments System Board discussed what it called...

Jamie Dimon Shows A Little Ankle.(Brief Article)
June 7, 2005... At last week's Sanford Bernstein Strategic Decisions conference, Jamie Dimon, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.'s president and chief operating officer--and soon to be chairman--made an informative presentation on his bank's performance in the days...

Who's Who.(Appointments)
June 7, 2005... * Mark Garvin was elected chairman of the CLS Group and CLS Bank International, succeeding Fritz T. Klein, who chaired the two units since June 2003 and served the maximum eight years as a CLS director of the group. Garvin had been serving as...

New To Market.(Dashen Bank SC)
June 7, 2005... * ACI Worldwide says that Ethiopia's Dashen Bank is using its BASE24 processing product, making Dashen the first bank in Ethiopia to issue and acquire Visa cards. The bank also will be using ACI's card management system and its smart chip...

The Checklist.
June 7, 2005... Ameriana Bancorp [ASBI] This $431 million bank holding corp. based in Indiana says it reached a $1 million settlement with the bankruptcy trustee in a case involving the 2002 collapse of Commercial Money Center Inc. (CMC), an equipment...

Bank Groups Back New Canadian Online Debit Choice.(Interac)(UseMyBank.com)
June 14, 2005... Canadian consumers soon will be able to debit their bank accounts directly for online purchases without giving the merchant any of their financial information, and the idea may be coming to the United States -- although it faces serious...

Glory Days May Be Over For Monoline Banks.(Present Focus Of Credit Card Industry)
June 14, 2005... Once, monoline banks--those dedicated to issuing credit cards--were the brilliant idea of the age. Ringing up double-digit growth year after year and becoming major financial corporations, companies like Capital One Bank, MBNA Corp. and...

NACHA Members Vote Down Return Fees.(National Automated Clearing House Association )(Brief Article)
June 14, 2005... NACHA's membership voted down the proposed $17-per-transaction fee the organization had proposed to cover the cost of so-called "return fees," normally levied when a payment that wasn't authorized by the payor is sent through by an...

China UnionPay Expands.(Bank Card Industry)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2005... China UnionPay card system signed a reciprocal debit-card deal two weeks ago with Japan's Sumitomo Mitsui Card company that allows each company's debit cards to be honored in the other's country. That deal sounds suspiciously like the deal...

Fed Reports Improving Household Debt Picture.(Moody's Investor's Service)(Consumer's Debt)
June 14, 2005... Although it comes as no good news to lenders, and especially credit-card companies, U.S, households apparently are reducing their debt levels -- in some cases to dramatic lows. Overall consumer debt was up about $88 billion at the end of...

Who's Who.(Appointments )(Brief Article)
June 14, 2005... * CPA Thomas G. Bevivino was named CFO of Severn Bancorp, Inc., replacing Cecelia Lowman, who has stepped down but who remains as controller. (Contact Severn Bancorp, 410/268-4554) * Deborah L. Bianucci was elected the BAI's president and...

Analysis: Time For CIOs To Plan For A Slowdown.(Chief Information Officers )
June 14, 2005... Life in the IT department is good right now, and chief information officers [CIOs] report strong business conditions. According to a Forrester Research Inc. report, The CIO Confidence Poll, most CIOs -- 77 percent -- report increased spending...

New To Market.
June 14, 2005... * Aquaracy Corp, which produces turnkey transaction processing sproducts for check, remittance and lockbox procesasors, says it has two new financial partners, CFB Investment Company and Clark Capital LLC, both based in Birmingham, Ala....

The Checklist.(revenue of Carreker Corp.)(patents given to Catuity Inc.)(eFunds Corp. acquires WildCard Systems)
June 14, 2005... Carreker Corporation [CANI] Payments provider Carreker says it had net income of $498,000, or $0.02 per share, on revenue of $28.2 million for the first quarter of 2005, compared with a net loss of ($1.1 million), or ($0.04) per share,...

The Clearing House Reinvented: Gaining a Foothold in the Future.
June 21, 2005... The Clearing House Payments Company [TCH] is owned by many of this country's--and the world's--largest banks, and therefore is at the very center of the U.S. payments system. It has been since it was founded in 1853 to clear and settle the...

TCH Angles for Majority Share Of Internet Consumer Traffic.(The Clearing House)
June 21, 2005... The Clearing House (TCH) isn't just interested in the business-to- business side of the payments business, says George Thomas, TCH's executive vice president for payments services. It also has a project to steer online consumer payments...

CardSystems Breach Means More Regulations Likely.
June 21, 2005... The news that CardSystems Solutions Inc. was hacked and that at least 68,000 MasterCard accounts had been stolen is likely to produce more federal and state identity theft laws. No matter that the recent cascade of identity theft events...

Money Laundering Software Can Transform the Bank.
June 21, 2005... Banks owe a lot to Osama Bin Laden. If 9/11 accomplished anything positive, it stepped up the fight against dirty money. The new generation of anti-money laundering software not only helps financial institutions better comply with the...

New To Market.
June 21, 2005... * Bank of America says it's launched its SiteKey authentication system in Tennessee. SiteKey uses an image, a brief phrase and three challenge questions, which the customer and bank exchange for online authentication. The system will...

The Checklist.
June 21, 2005... * BancWest Corp. This private parent of Bank of the West and First Hawaiian Bank says its Bank of the West unit is buying $10.4 billion Commercial Federal Corp. for $1.36 billion in cash, or $34 a share, plus $0.50 a share at closing....

Fallout from CardSystems Hacking Theft Extensive.(end-to-end payment processing)
June 28, 2005... Whatever the ultimate fallout from last week's CardSystems Solutions Inc. scandal, payments industry veterans agree on one thing: CardSystems is toast. It's hard to imagine, many say, why anyone now would want to do business with...

Debitman Still Struggling Despite Innovative Ideas.(Debitman Inc.)
June 28, 2005... Debitman Card Inc. has a sales premise almost to good to be true: Merchants that use it turn a sales cost into a profit by getting much of the interchange fees back on each debit transaction. Yet, three years after it launched, the start-up...

A Busy Week for Payments Industry News.(interchange rates)(cases of antitrust violations)
June 28, 2005... For a sector popularly regarded as a back-office function, payments generated plenty of news last week. We will pursue the most interesting events in more detail in next week's issue, but will summarize some of them here, since in many cases...

A Word on Rhetoric.
June 28, 2005... Speaking about that class-action lawsuit: In our opinion, the credit card industry needs to readjust its rhetorical position if it hopes to win in court, judging by the essay defending credit cards in last Friday's Wall Street Journal by...

Who's Who.(Appointments)
June 28, 2005... * Alexander "Sandy" Dawson was named non-executive chairman of Catuity Inc. He replaces Duncan Mount, who resigned June 23, the day after he sold most his Catuity shares. Dawson is the retired CEO of Arnotts Ltd. Catuity, which provides...

Banks Can Use Payments Data to Build Loyalty, But Not Easily.(IPSOS Business Strategists)
June 28, 2005... The idea that slapping free bill pay onto the bank Web site will automatically translate into customer loyalty is overstated at best, says Timothy Keiningham, senior vice president of IPSOS Business Strategists. Building customer loyalty pays...

New To Market.(CertifiChecks Inc)
June 28, 2005... * The Bank of New York has a new payments channel that it says allows U.S. financial institutions to make international funds transfer payments in both U.S. dollars and foreign currencies using their legacy funds transfer systems, called...

The Checklist.
June 28, 2005... Bottomline Technologies [EPAY] This payments and invoice automation vendor says it filed a prospectus supplement with the SEC relating to a public offering of 4 million shares of common stock. The offering consists of 2.75 million shares...