Electronic Payments Week articles from November 2004

Electronic Payments Week archives from November 2004

Why China Is A Treasury-Management Nightmare.
November 2, 2004... Ask any businessman about China and you can almost see the dollar signs begin to revolve in his eyes. Ask how he or she manages treasury operations there, and you'll get a hard look and a sigh. Dostoyevsky himself couldn't have imagined...

Tech Update: ARC Growth Slowing, But Still Strong.(Accounts-receivable conversion)
November 2, 2004... Accounts-receivable conversion (ARC) may be slowing from its truly explosive growth last year -- 500 percent this year versus 700 percent last year -- but it's hardly cause for widow's weeds. The truth is, some of the apparent slowdown is...

Google Looks For A Payments Meister.
November 2, 2004... Is giant search engine Google moving into the payments business? The company isn't saying, but during the week of Oct. 18, the company ran a helpwanted ad for what it called a "senior manager, payment infrastructure." And Google, which receives...

New To Market.
November 2, 2004... * Several of Marshall & Ilsley Corp.'s financial services subsidiaries have set up shop with an independent Kansas bank and launched an end-to-end Check 21 operation for the 4,000-plus members of M&I's Endpoint Exchange checkimaging archive....

Citi CEO Apologizes To Japan.
November 2, 2004... In what was surely one of the most unusual sights in memory, CitiGroup CEO Charles Prince and his new deputy in Japan, Douglas L. Peterson, held a news conference in Tokyo, apologizing to Japan, explaining how they were going to do better in...

New Hope For U.S. Smart-Card Market.
November 2, 2004... Former anti-terrorism chief Richard Clarke thinks there may be a big future for smart cards in this country. Smart cards haven't gained much traction in the United States despite their being popular overseas, but at the Smart Card Alliance's...

Venture Capital Spending Falls.(Brief Article)
November 2, 2004... Investing in the future, at least measured by how much venture capitalists are spending, fell somewhat in the third quarter, according to the MoneyTree Survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, Thomson Venture Economics and the National...

MasterCard Goes Chinese.(Brief Article)
November 2, 2004... GE's Corporate Payment Services unit has deals in the works to sell its MasterCard products to Guang-dong Development Bank, Guang-zhou, People's Republic of China, and to ChinaTrust Commercial Bank, Republic of China [Taiwan]. Guang-dong will...

Who's Who.(Brief Article)
November 2, 2004... * Ann Fritz Hackett, president and founder of Horizon Consulting Group, was appointed to the board of Capital One Financial Corp. She will be nominated for re-election by the shareholders next April. (Capital One Financial Corp., 703/720-2352)...

The Checklist.
November 2, 2004... American Express Co. [AXP] Amex had a net income of $879 million, or $.69 per share, on revenues of $7.2 billion in 3Q04, compared with net income of $770 million, or $.59 per share, on revenues of $6.4 billion in the same period last...

Ernst & Young Survey Says Bank Payments Biz Shrinking.
November 9, 2004... The cash-management business is in decline and for structural reasons, according to this year's Ernst & Young LLP cash-management survey. Revenues among the top five cash-management providers fell for the second straight year, while...

Team Effort Busts International 'Shadowcrew' Internet Ring.
November 9, 2004... On Oct. 26 at 10 p.m. Eastern time, U.S. Secret Service agents along with local and overseas law enforcement shut down Shadowcrew.com with 28 simultaneous raids in the United States, Europe and South America in an action called Operation...

Another SARS Shoe Drops In California.
November 9, 2004... County Bank of Merced, Calif. -- population 63,893 -- is the latest subject of what seems an unending torrent of compliance agreements with the Fed over Bank Secrecy Act deficiencies. In this case, the $1.3 billion bank apparently was duped...

Wachovia Checks Into The Future.
November 9, 2004... Wachovia Corp. issued a series of announcements last week that, taken together, indicate the bank is grasping the Check21/ARC/truncation nettle before the thorns get too sharp. In quick succession, the bank's treasury services division said its...

Reports: Bank Outsourcing Risks.
November 9, 2004... Three recent studies suggest treasury-management outsourcing may not become the overarching business model for world domination some of the big players are hoping it will be. First out of the box: The August report from the Bank of...

New To Market.
November 9, 2004... * MasterCard International says that, as of the third quarter, its customers had issued more than 200 million smart cards around the world under the MasterCard, Maestro and Cirrus brand names. About 40 percent of those cards now carry an EMV...

Who's Who.(Brief Article)
November 9, 2004... * James F.E. Gillespie was promoted to deputy chief counsel for The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. He has been serving as assistant chief counsel since 1995, and he managed legal projects involving electronic banking and technology....

The Checklist.
November 9, 2004... AmSouth Bancorporation [ASO] AmSouth Bancorporation in Alabama, a bank holding company, sold its credit-card portfolio to MBNA Corp., and it expects a pre-tax net gain of about $170 million from the transaction. The portfolio has about...

SARs: Too Much Information?(suspicious activity report filings )
November 16, 2004... Late last month the world was treated to the bemusing spectacle of a cop complaining he had too many leads. The cop? William J. Fox, director of FinCen (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network). The leads? Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs)....

Forex Operations Routine, Even For Smaller Banks.(foreign-exchange)
November 16, 2004... Before the Continuous-Linked Settlement (CLS) Bank was being set up in 1997, foreign-exchange dealing was the preserve of broker-dealers like Phibro Ltd., and big banks like Banker's Trust operating through the correspondent banking model. Both...

Philippines Taps Wells Fargo For Remittance.
November 16, 2004... With about 230,000-plus remittance outlets in the United States sending about $20 billion a year just to Mexico and the Philippines, fighting the sort of small-time money transfers that helped finance the 9/11 terrorists would seem to be a...

Breaking News: Amex Vs. Everyone.(Brief Article)
November 16, 2004... Open war broke out in the credit-card business at press time as American Express announced a lawsuit against Visa USA, MasterCard International and eight major banks that are members of the card associations, demanding an unspecified billions...

Yet Another Bank In Cuffs.(International Bank of Miami N.A. signed consent decree )
November 16, 2004... Banks running afoul of the law are falling like rain. The latest: International Bank of Miami (IBM), the $1.05 billion, Coral Gables, Fla.-based commercial bank controlled by Columbian and El Salvadoran nationals that signed a consent decree...

Phony Canadian Banks.(Brief Article)
November 16, 2004... The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency says two Canadian banks --All Canadian Financial Co. and Fairbank Group, Offshore Banking -- have been offering full-service Internet banking, but neither of them are licensed Canadian banks. All...

U.K. Credit-Card Fee Woes.(Brief Article)
November 16, 2004... England's Office of Fair Trading says MasterCard's interchange fee -- the fee paid to the banks that issue the credit cards to cover such things as fraud (typically amounting to about 1.1 percent of the value of a transaction in the U.K.) -- is...

Is PayPal Going Mobile?(Brief Article)
November 16, 2004... eBay's PayPal payments unit posted a job notice on CraigsList the for a mobile payments expert, raising immediate speculation that it was about to launch a new payments venue or, at least, it was testing the mobile waters. The company says it's...

New To Market.
November 16, 2004... * No Borders Inc. will be marketing its affinity stored-value cards to the 20 homeowners' associations belonging to the Federation of Michoacan Hometown Associations of Illinois, branded with both organizations' names. As part of the deal, the...

The Checklist.
November 16, 2004... Bantek West Inc. Bantek West, a privately held ATM company, is buying The Wilson Group, an ATM, desktop workstation-and-OEM maintenance company. Wilson will operate as a separate wholly owned Bantek subsidiary, with all its personnel in...

How Can Banks Make A Living On Payments?
November 23, 2004... Banks are conservative institutions and this has traditionally been their strength. But in revolutionary times, when traditional banking has been turned on its head, conservative institutions must change or die, and so far, banks have been slow...

American Express Goes 'To The Mattresses'.
November 23, 2004... American Express last Monday made the much-anticipated announcement that it was going to court against Visa, MasterCard, and eight top credit card issuing banks, seeking unspecified billions of dollars in damages. The suit, filed in federal...

Fidelity National In Play?
November 23, 2004... Having just paid $2.5 billion to assemble a payments outsourcing unit, reports are circulating that Fidelity National Financial Inc. is attracting the wrong sort of attention from investors. Shares of Fidelity rose about 10 percent on the...

Regulation E Becoming Reality.
November 23, 2004... Regulation E, which governs the use of payroll cards as a substitute for payroll checks, is almost a reality. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issued its final call for comments on Nov. 16, with a Nov. 19 deadline. The regulations...

No Penny Wrappers Here.(Brief Article)
November 23, 2004... Demented stunt of the week award goes to Eugene J, Sukie, a 79-year-old retired glass plant worker from Barberton, Ohio, who last week cashed in the remainder of a 1,048,013 penny collection, weighing 3.5 tons, at two Coinstar Inc. coin...

Who's Who.(Appointments)
November 23, 2004... * Frank D'Angelo was named chairman of The Electronic Funds Transfer Association. D'Angelo is currently senior vice president of Metavante Corp. and group executive of its Payment Solutions Group. (Contact: Electronic Funds Transfer Association...

Washington Outlook, 2005.
November 23, 2004... GOP In Control Of Banking Agenda Now that the Republican Party has preserved its control of the legislative and executive branches of government, it begs the question--what's in store for financial services in Washington? Much, of...

New To Market.
November 23, 2004... * Bank of America's Global Treasury Management Services is offering a suite of imaging products, including remote deposit; remote capture of U.S. dollar-denominated checks in international locations; Image Cash Letter; what it calls "payee...

The Checklist.
November 23, 2004... Capital One Financial Corp. [COF] This big credit card company has a new platinum card with a rate always equal to the prevailing bank prime rate--currently 5 percent. Among the features: No balance transfer or cash advance fees; no annual...