Mobile Payment Industry News: 06/17/09

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

PIN Payments Blog is Globa(lol)

Does this catapult me to all the way up to third-rate blogger status :-)

http://thefinanser.co.uk/fsclub/2009/06/things-worth-reading-16th-june-2009.html

Things worth reading: 16th June 2009
Things we're reading today include:

Robert Peston: Should we trust the regulators? (BBC)
FSA Must Assess Impact Of Rule Changes On Bank Lending (Times)
John B. Frank: Anti-Phishing with Two Factor Authentication (PIN Payments News/Information Security Resources)
Africa pioneers mobile bank push (BBC)
Sumitomo Mitsui: Japanese Bank Plans $9.4 Billion Share Sale (New York Times)
Financial crisis: Worst may be still ahead, says IMF chief(Guardian)
European recession will worsen, says economist(Independent)
Eurozone Banks 'face $283bn of further writedowns' (Times)
Financial Stability Review June 2009 (ECB)
US recession will be less severe than feared, IMF says(Telegraph)
It’s Too Soon to Call an End to the Banking Crisis (New York Times)
Helping countries emerge from the economic crisis: a World Bank perspective (Insead)

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Dynamic Card Solutions easyPIN Available

Dynamic Card Solutions Announces CardWizard® easyPIN

Cardholders Now Have the Freedom to Change Their EMV PINs Anywhere, Anytime

ENGLEWOOD, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dynamic Card Solutions (DCS), the leading instant card issuance, PIN selection and PIN change provider for financial institutions, today announced the availability of its new patent-pending EMV PIN change solution — CardWizard® easyPIN — that allows portable and remote changing of cardholder’s EMV PINs. By utilizing DCS’ new software-based easyPIN solution and associated unconnected smart card readers, issuers can now offer their cardholders the freedom to perform EMV PIN management from their home, office or anywhere the customer has access to a web browser or telephone.

Cardholders typically need to change their PINs because they either cannot remember a randomly assigned PIN, they want to use one PIN across multiple cards, or they have entered the wrong PIN multiple times and their card is now blocked. Traditional EMV PIN management methods require cardholders to physically go to their financial institution’s chip-enabled ATM to change their PIN. With DCS’ easyPIN, issuers do not need any brick and mortar branch or ATM location to achieve the PIN change or card unblock.

DCS’ easyPIN makes use of an Internet or phone connection and a small unconnected handheld smart card reader that is issued by their financial institution. Cardholders can simply insert their EMV card into the smart card reader and follow the instructions that prompt them to change their PIN. This can be done through the online banking website, interactive voice response (IVR) support, or an optical interface.

“Until now, changing chip-based PINs required costly brick and mortar-based infrastructure, but now, thanks to easyPIN, cardholders can change EMV PINs anywhere,” said Spencer Cark, director of international markets for DCS. “DCS easyPIN saves issuers significant infrastructure investment, while enhancing cardholder satisfaction and ultimately increasing card usage.”

DCS works with multiple card reader manufactures to develop devices compatible with CardWizard easyPIN technology. The flexible design of DCS’ easyPIN means it can be integrated into issuers’ existing customer delivery channels such as home banking, and the solution is also compatible with standard Two Factor Authentication (2FA) functionality, such as MasterCard CAP & Visa DPA, ensuring that the deployed readers provide a wide range of features to cardholders.

The easyPIN platform is available now. For more information about the system and other DCS’ instant issue technology offerings, please visit www.instantissuance.com.

About Dynamic Card Solutions

Founded in 1996 and a wholly owned subsidiary of Dynamic Solutions International, Dynamic Card Solutions (DCS) develops instant issuance, PIN selection and PIN change solutions for banks, credit unions and retailers that issue EMV, contactless and magnetic stripe cards. DCS is the leading instant issuance provider for Visa® and MasterCard® debit cards. The company offers fully integrated solutions that allow financial institutions and retailers to quickly and securely issue debit, credit and ATM cards instantly at branch or store locations, and change PINs virtually anywhere, anytime. Issuing cards instantly increases customer service, card sales and revenue, and eliminates current card issuance costs. DCS' system includes a user-friendly administration component that provides full reporting, card inventory and more. All solutions utilize encryption and are compliant with recommended security procedures for instant issuance. For additional information, call +1 303.754.2000 or visit the Dynamic Card Solutions Web site at www.instantissuance.com.

© 2009 Dynamic Card Solutions. All Rights Reserved. All trademarks, service marks and trade names referenced in this material are the property of their respective owners.

easyPIN, CardWizard, Dynamic Card Solutions, PIN Payments, Payments News, PIN Debit, PIN, HomeATM

Visa Clashes with Wal*Mart on $48 Billion Card Fee

Visa Clashes With Wal-Mart on $48 Billion Card Fee
By Peter Eichenbaum

June 17 (Bloomberg) -- Visa Inc., MasterCard Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co., already squeezed by new U.S. curbs on how credit cards are marketed to consumers, are girding for a renewed battle over $48 billion in fees levied on merchants.

Lawmakers are promising new rules to bring down the interchange fee, a charge on purchases sometimes topping 3 percent that’s split by the two banks serving the customer and merchant. Supporters of the legislation include the biggest retail chains, restaurants and small businesses, which say the fees erode profit and inflate prices.

The debate pits the largest card lenders including JPMorgan and the two biggest payment networks, Visa and MasterCard, against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target Corp. Interchange is the second-biggest cost after payroll, Target said, and merchants want to negotiate lower payments collectively without running afoul of antitrust law.

“The real question is whether the government is going to jump in and get into the game of price control in the free market,” Chris McWilton, MasterCard’s U.S. markets president, told investors at a June 4 conference. San Francisco-based Visa said June 5 the legislation would raise consumer costs and cut rewards. A similar bill failed last year, the firm said.

Continue Reading at Bloomberg

Visa, WalMart, Wal-Mart, Interchange, Lawmakers, JPMorgan Chase & Co, MasterCard, Interchange Fee, Target

Canada Starts Chip and PIN Propaganda

With Canada completing the move from magnetic stripes to smart cards by the end of 2010, they are beginning their "Smart Card's Are Safer" Campaign. Here's a story from the Vancouver Sun pointing out that if you use smart cards, then you won't ever have to buy $10,000 worth of TV's in Memphis...

How smart is the smart chip?

By Eric Lam, Financial PostJune 16, 2009

With credit and debit card fraud on the rise, Canadian issuers and banks are switching to more secure smartchips in place of the vulnerable magnetic stripe. But, according to experts, the chip is no guarantee of a fraud-free world.

Last year, when Bruce Cran went to Europe, he had all kinds of trouble with his Canadian credit cards. Cashiers in shops and restaurants everywhere gave him funny looks because his card was the old-fashioned kind: No space-age microchips, just a magnetic stripe. Still, they took his card and Mr. Cran, head of the Consumers' Association of Canada, went home without a care in the world.

That changed when he tried to get into an Ottawa hotel room 10 days later.
"Someone tried to purchase $10,000 worth of TVs in Memphis, Tenn. using my card," he said with a chuckle. "I just couldn't believe it."
Mr. Cran managed to get a room using another card, but it took him a day to find out what actually happened and another two weeks to get a new card. He does not know whether the crooks who nabbed his card number, probably when he handed it over at a Parisian outdoor cafe, managed to get away with the Sony TVs.
"If it had been a chip card, they couldn't have done it," he said.
Mr. Cran's story is the kind of cautionary tale that Canadian banks and credit card companies are looking for as they move to the next generation smartchip credit card. Many people already have one, and the industry expects complete market adoption by 2010.

The new cards are meant to curb credit card fraud by encrypting account information on a microchip protected by a personal identification number (PIN). Instead of signing receipts, consumers enter a PIN to validate a transaction.

Continue Reading at the Vancouver Sun

smart card, magnetic stripe, chip and pin, PIN Debit, PIN Number,

Wasn't Me...It Was the Russian Hackers!

From the Washington Post

An Odyssey of Fraud - Brian Krebs

Andy Kordopatis is the proprietor of Odyssey Bar, a modest watering hole in Pocatello, Idaho, a few blocks away from Idaho State University. Most of his customers pay for their drinks with cash, but about three times a day he receives a phone call from someone he's never served -- in most cases someone who's never even been to Idaho -- asking why their credit or debit card has been charged a small amount by his establishment.

Kordopatis says he can usually tell what's coming next when the caller immediately asks to speak with the manager or owner.

"That's when I start telling them that I know why they're calling, and about the Russian hackers who are using my business," Kordopatis said.

The Odyssey Bar is but one of dozens of small establishments throughout the United States seemingly picked at random by organized cyber criminals to serve as unwitting pawns in a high-stakes game of chess against the U.S. financial system. This daily pattern of phone calls and complaints has been going on for more than...

Continue Reading at Security Fix by Brian Krebs

Fraud Constantly "Dogging" Online Banks

Starting to become Pet Peeve?

With so much online fraud aimed at users of Web-based banking and brokerage sites, experts have long postulated that financial services providers would eventually play a bigger role in helping end users defend themselves, such as via offering advanced security features and anti-malware tools directly to customers versus relying on end users alone to protect their own devices.

However, as many of these companies have attempted to foster such programs over the years, as in the distribution of two-factor authentication tokens and the like to their customers, users have frequented rebelled in the name of keeping their online interactions as straightforward as possible, instead of embracing the extra devices or passwords they've been asked to use to go about their e-business.

In fact, some experts have maintained that the more virtual levers that banks and other companies force their users to throw in order to get into their online accounts, the more likely those customers are to simply to move to another service provider whose systems aren't as onerous to use. (Editor's Note: Besides NOT being limited to 2FA, and providing a money transfer platform, bill payment platform and eCommerce transactional platform, "straightforward" is yet another reason HomeATM's PCI 2.0 Certified device is superior to tokens and OTP dongles. There is nothing "onerous" about using it and you can't get anymore "straightforward." Last time I checked, "everyone" knows how to swipe their card and enter their PIN. It's what they do at ATM's and/or brick and mortar locations everyday of their lives.)

At the same time, attacks including Trojans and Web-based drive-bys targeting e-banking and trading applications have only continued to become more ubiquitous and sophisticated.

Now, some proponents of the provider-driven anti-malware model contend that the time has actually come for the concept to take off, based both on the sheer amounts of money, and customers, that banks are losing at the hands of cyber-crime.

With the towering costs of customer churn and people returning to paper-based accounts staring them in the face, online banks are looking for new ways to solve the problem, claims Michael Stanfield, CEO of Virginia-based Intersections, a vendor of so-called identity risk management solutions.

In addition to the continued proliferation of threats, the arrival of more effective anti-fraud tools, such as those sold by Intersections, is driving more widespread adoption of the systems among banks and trading companies, he said.

To note, 90 percent of the company's current business is coming from white-label OEM deals with big name banks

"The perception that integrating more expansive security features into their services will actually cost them business has led some of these providers to hesitate to be more proactive, but in the next two or three years I think we're going to see a dramatic shift as these companies simply can no longer afford the levels of fraud and customer turnover that they've seen over the last few years," Stanfield said. including Bank of America, CapitalOne and CitiBank, the executive said.

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Intel, Oracle, PayPal Back ID Technology Interop Group
Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service

The Kantara Initiative, formed to promote interoperability among identity verification applications and services, launched on Wednesday with big-name backers like Oracle, Intel, eBay's PayPal, AOL, CA, Novell, Fidelity Investments, Liberty Alliance, Boeing, Internet Society and British Telecom.

Kantara (kan-TAR-a): Swahili for "bridge"; Arabic roots in "harmony"

Kantara Initiative: Bridging and harmonizing theidentity community with actions that will help ensure secure,identity-based, online interactions while preventing misuse of personalinformation so that networks will become privacy protecting and morenatively trustworthy environments.

Enterprise vendors, large companies and technology startups have in recent years developed a wide array of identity applications and services, creating a growing need to address this technology fragmentation, said Roger Sullivan, an Oracle executive who is president of the Liberty Alliance and of the Kantara Initiative.

"This initiative is aimed at harmonizing across the wide spectrum of ID technologies and ID business practices, from social networking Web 2.0 communities to traditional enterprise deployments and technologies," said Sullivan, Oracle's vice president of identity management.

Continue Reading at PC World

Value of Bankcard Transactions Fall by 18% y/y in May

Value of bankcard transactions fall by 18% y/y in May.

ISI - Emerging Markets

The value of debit and creditcard transactions dropped to MKD 7.973bn (EUR 129.8mn) in May. Inmonthly terms, the value of transactions decreased by 2.7% ...

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SMS Hacking Among Newly Discovered Threats to Cell Phone Users

Yesterday I posted and commented on an article published by Alibaba.com in which they say the cell phone is the safest way to bank online. I think not. Today Dark Reading reports that newly discovered threats aimed at cell phones will be presented at Black Hat USA next month in Vegas. Here are excerpts for yesterday's post and today's Dark Reading article.

Is Cell Phone Safest Way to Bank Online? In a word, No!

Safest Way to Bank Online? Your Cell Phone
Here'san article which essentially says, everybody knows how to stealinformation from PC users, but cell-phones aren't breached as much, soyour chances are better if you use a cell phone for online banking. Ihad to chuckle and couldn't help but think that the equivalent of whatthey are saying is thus:

"When you leaves your keys in yourignition, the likelihood of your car being stolen is higher than if youput them in your glove compartment...so put them there." The statementmay be true, but putting your keys in your glove compartment probablyisn't a good idea either.

At the end of the day, if you type,the bad guys can swipe. So convincing me to use my cell phone foronline banking is, well, a hard cell.

Researchers To Unleash New SMS Hacking Tool At Black Hat...

Jun 16, 2009 | 04:42 PM By Kelly Jackson Higgins
DarkReading

Texting just keeps getting riskier: Researchers at next month's Black Hat USA in Las Vegas will demonstrate newly discovered threats to mobile phone users, as well as release a new iPhone application that tests phones for security flaws.

SMS hacking has captured the attention of security researchers lately. In March, Tobias Engel demonstrated an exploit that lets an attacker crash SMS text inboxes on several Nokia mobile phone models. Called the "Curse of Silence" attack, the exploit uses a specially crafted SMS message to launch a denial-of-service (DoS) attack on the victim's phone. While the SMS/MMS messaging features go dark, the phone itself remains operational after the attack.

And with mobile phones increasingly storing more sensitive personal and business information, they will inevitably become a bigger target for attackers, Lackey says. "SMS is interesting -- it's an 'always-on' attack surface," he says, and can be used for a DoS or for executing malware on a victim's phone, for example.

Mobile phones are also even more difficult than laptops to manage and protect, leaving them wide open to compromise. Unlike a company-issued laptop, however, mobile phones are sometimes privately owned by users and are under little or no corporate control, Miras says. The best way for users to protect themselves from SMS-based attacks today, he says, is to keep their phones patched.

Read in Entirety at Dark Reading

Scathing Report on Interchange's Affect on Businesses

A story written in the Bradenton Herald talks about the effects of Interchange and how it affects retailers: Here's a sampling:

Credit card fees decried | By BRIAN NEILL - bneill@bradenton.com

Representatives of several retail organizations delivered a scathing report Monday about the state of credit card fees on businesses.

Mallory Duncan, senior vice president and general counsel for the National Retail Federation, said interchange or “swipe” fees that credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard charge on each transaction are making it harder and harder for small businesses to remain profitable.

In 2001, Visa and MasterCard collected about $16 billion in fees. Last year, the two companies combined collected roughly $48 billion, Duncan said.

“It (the fee) typically is around 2 percent,” Duncan said. “Now to put that number into perspective, for most merchants, if you look at their after-tax profits ... the net profit is only about 2 percent. So the fees are as much or more in some cases as most merchants’ net profits. And the fees have increased dramatically.”

Doug Kantor, counsel to the National Association of Convenience Stores, said the fees have become so burdensome that Marion, Walton, Osceola and Brevard counties in Florida have stopped accepting Visa for tax payments.

“Obviously, we’re in a day and age where these local businesses don’t have the option to say, ‘I won’t take Visa,’ or ‘I won’t take MasterCard.’ So many people now have those cards,” he said. “They simply can’t stay in business and do that in any realistic way. County tax collectors can because people have to pay their taxes.”

Continue Reading: http://www.bradenton.com/business/story/1496301.html

Visa, Interchange Fees, PIN Debit, National Retail Federation

ComScore Says Online Sales Showing Effects of Economy

Online sales slump as older consumers grow cautious, comScore says

First the good news for online retailers: E-commerce continues to take a larger piece of the total retail pie. Now the bad news: It is growing at much slower rate in today`s economy. What`s still unclear is how long the slump will last, comScore Inc.`s Gian Fulgoni, said today at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition in Boston.

"Clearly the consumer is behaving differently today," Fulgoni, chairman of the Internet usage measurement company, said in his presentation. "What is uncertain is if the changes in spending will be permanent changes."

Fulgoni said online retail spending was flat in the first quarter of 2009 compared to a year earlier at $31 billion, while total retail sales fell 5%. E-commerce grew at a 17% rate over the prior year in Q1 of 2008.

So, why are online shoppers spending less? In addition to the sour economy, Fulgoni says higher prices for gas and groceries have eaten into e-commerce revenue over the past year because they are necessities not typically sold on the web.

"E-commerce is about disposable income, and gas and groceries are eating away at disposable income," he said. And while gas prices have dropped in recent months, Fulgoni says, recent data shows them creeping up again, rising 11% from March to April.

And, comScore`s recent survey from April survey showed consumers are still worried about their financial future, four in five consumers are more afraid of their economic future than ever before.

Continue Reading at Internet Retailer.com

Gian Fulgoni's Quarterly Review of "The State of U.S. Online Retail Economy through Q1 2009 can be accessed below:

Speaker: Gian Fulgoni Event: comScore Webinar

Download Slides
View Presentation

comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni presents a quarterly review of the state of the U.S. online retail economy.
Presentation highlights include:

An overview of changes in consumers' online spending patterns and how these relate to consumers' offline behavior
Consumer sentiment regarding the economy
Analysis of spending patterns across key product categories
Review of consumer spending by demographic segments
Analysis of differences in performance across retailer segments
Overview of the impact of search, comparison shopping and advertising on e-commerce spending in today's economy

ComScore, Gian Fulgoni, The State of the US Online Retail Economy

What Will Be on Twitter's Tombstone?

An article published in eMarketer poses the question:

Time to Write Twitter’s Tombstone?

In sports, if you hit .360 with 30 HR's and 100 RBI's (and you're lucky enough to be a free agent) you will get several very lucrative offers from several teams. In business, if you do what Twitter is doing you (reportedly) get offered a very lucrative $700 million for the company.

In baseball, if you don't immediately take the big contract, (as negotiating ploy) in order to try and get more from another team...and subsequently, during negotiations with other teams, it comes out that you were taking steroids, you can kiss the big contract goodbye.

So...is Twitter a fad, running on performance enhancing media stories and fueled by celebrity twits, or is it the real deal? Only Time will tell. (not the magazine) I say they shoulda taken the $700 million...

Here's the eMarketer story.

Twitter made the June 15, 2009, cover of TIME magazine. In a lead article, the publication predicted the microblogging site, consisting of tiny 140-character messages, would have a huge impact on businesses:

“As Twitter grows, it will increasingly become a place where companies build brands, do research, send information to customers,
conduct e-commerce and create communities for their users. Some
industries, like local retail, could be transformed by Twitter—both at one-store operations that cater to customers within a few blocks of their locations and at the individual stores of giant retail operations
like Wal-Mart.”

The Washington Post ran an article, “Living on Twitter Time,” that covered the public’s fascination with tweets running the gamut of subjects from celebrities to politics.

MSNBC ran an article about how the phenomenon was invading Sunday services—“Holy Twitter! They’re Tweeting from the Pews.”

Of course, the fact that Twitter is now the subject of attention from the mass media has many in online media pronouncing its death and busily scratching out obituaries.

“Twitter’s fame and glory is not going to last,” wrote Jason Clark in an iMedia Connection article entitled “Why Twitter Will Soon Become Obsolete.” “I predict Twitter will find its social media and marketing niche, but I cannot see it being nearly as important as some marketers are making it out to be.”

In “Twitter at the Vanishing Point,” InformationWeek listed the site’s many technical flaws and noted, “Twitter isn't exactly catching fire with Generation Y.”

The latter criticism appears to be true. A survey by the Participatory Marketing Network (PMN) found that only 22% of Gen Yers used Twitter, a surprisingly low percentage since the survey found that 99% claimed to have an active profile on at least one social networking site.

But, criticism notwithstanding, Twitter is showing little sign of a slowdown in growth. In May, Compete estimated that Twitter had 19.7 million unique visitors, far short of MySpace and Facebook. But it is growing much faster than the
more-established social networking sites—more than 1,000% over the previous year.

But what is the verdict on Twitter: hot as in a flash in the pan, or hot as in the fiery eruption of a new medium?

The New York Times reported that since 2007 Dell had earned $3 million in revenues directly from Twitter postings, mainly through coupons and word-of-mouth. In interviews with online marketers, eMarketer found many of them enthusiastic about the business possibilities of Twitter. “Twitter can be used as a form of permission-based marketing to
encourage two-way conversation, and brands can use it to create relevant, authentic and transparent communications,” said Stephanie Busak of Bob Evans Farms. “It can be used to build brand recency, loyalty and is a traffic
generation tool in which links within profiles and tweets can direct people to specific areas of a site, microsites and blogs.” “We have over 6,000 followers now on Twitter,” said David Tryder of Dunkin’ Donuts. “It’s another place where customers who really care about the brand can have a conversation with us.”

If marketers can master (or develop) ways to use the conversational aspects of Twitter to strengthen customer relationships, and sell like Dell, make no mistake, Twitter will be around for a long, long time—if Twitter CEO Evan Williams and company can work out the matter of a viable business model. Note: No matter which side of the Twitter debate you are on, the power, scope and possibilities of the social medium are vividly on display in Tehran, where Iranians are using Twitter to not only communicate—bypassing censors—but posting photos of demonstrations and
bloodied protestors (see Social Networks Spread Defiance Online, from The New York Times).

To follow eMarketer on Twitter, click here.
To follow the PIN Payments Blog on Twitter, click here.

twitter, tombstone, Time Magazine

Watch a Clickjacking Attack (Video)

Watch a clickjacking attack take control of a Webcam

Date: June 16th, 2009

Author: Bill Detwiler

Category: Adobe, Hacking, IT Dojo, Security

Tags: Webcam, Attack, Grossman, Security, Bill Detwiler

CNET reported on clickjacking back in September 2008, but if you haven’t
seen how easy it is for malicious individuals to perpetrate a
clickjacking attack, here’s your chance. In this episode of CNET’s show
Hacks, Executive Editor Tom Merritt and Jeremiah Grossman from Whitehat
Security explore the basics of “clickjacking”. Grossman demonstrates
how clickjacking can be used to activate a computer’s Webcam using
Flash and offers a few tips for protecting yourself.

nFinanSe Now Holds 42 Money Transmitter Licenses

nFinanSe Continues Enhanced Compliance in the Distribution of Reloadable Cards, Issued Directly by Nationally Chartered Banks and Under nFinanSe’s Obtained State Money Transmitter Licenses

TAMPA, Fla.- nFinanSe Inc. (OTCBB:NFSE) today announced that it has successfully completed its efforts to become fully-licensed as a “Money Transmitter” in connection with the sale and reloading of the Company’s Reloadable Prepaid Cards at major retail chain stores.

The Company stated that it is now licensed in the District of Columbia and forty-one states requiring licensure in order to sell and reload reloadable prepaid cards. Seven states do not require such licensure and the Company has elected to not offer its nFinanSe Discover® Network Reloadable Prepaid Cards in the states of Hawaii and Vermont.

Jerry R. Welch, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, said, “We are pleased to have completed this important project for our Company. The sale and reloading of prepaid cards at retail stores is still in its early stages of development. As such, there has been much discussion and some question about the controlling legal authority over the sale and reloading of prepaid cards. Even though our cards are issued by federally chartered banks, many states have taken the position that a state license is required. As a result, program managers, like ourselves, have applied for and received state licenses. As a Licensee, we then assure legal compliance for those retailers that become our authorized agents.”

Mr. Welch continued, “Until the issue of controlling legal authority is ultimately settled in the courts, we believe the right approach is to both issue our cards through a federally chartered bank and to maintain state Money Transmitter licenses. Our objective is to ensure that our retail partners are always deemed compliant under both federal and state law.”

About nFinanSe Inc.

nFinanSe Inc. is an innovative financial services company and provider of stored value and prepaid card solutions headquartered in Tampa, Florida. nFinanSe has developed the nFinanSe Network, a secure, reliable value load and activation platform that connects with retail merchants and other value load stations located throughout the United States. For more information visit www.nfinanse.com.

Cards are issued by Palm Desert National Bank pursuant to a license by Discover® Network. Discover® Network and the Discover Network Acceptance Mark are service marks used by Palm Desert National Bank under license from Discover Financial Services.

Cards are issued by First National Bank in Pipestone, Pipestone, MN pursuant to a license by Discover® Network. First National Bank in Pipestone is part of the Fishback Financial Corporation. All cards are FDIC insured with the exception of the nFinanSe Gift Card.

nFinanSe, prepaid cards, Reloadable Cards, Money Transmitter, Jerry R. Welch

Ukash Partners with MasterCard

Press Release

Global e-commerce payment method provider Ukash is to partner with MasterCard to facilitate the launch of its pioneering MasterCard rePower service in Europe.

The move is part of a strategic initiative from the London-based online payment solutions firm and will enable consumers to load cash onto their MasterCard and Maestro prepaid cards at point-of-sale locations.

Ukash is regulated by the UK’s Financial Services Authority and revealed that it has an existing global network of 275,000 issuing points with a track record within the alternative payments industry that is second to none. By partnering with MasterCard, it will be enable the rapid scale delivery of the MasterCard rePower service across Europe.

Ukash currently processes several million transactions a year with values in excess of €100 million and revealed that the benefits of its service to the consumer include immediate access to funds alongside the trust and security of the MasterCard brand, which is safer than carrying cash.

To charge money onto a card using the MasterCard rePower service, consumers simply swipe the card and it is loaded with funds in exchange for cash. The value of the transaction is then immediately available for the consumer to spend anywhere that accepts MasterCard.

Ukash revealed that the service would initially be enabled across the UK before moving into the rest of Europe via partners within its issuing estate.

“Partnering with MasterCard for the launch of Mastercard rePower is a very significant step for Ukash,” said Mark Chirnside, Chief Executive Officer for Ukash.

“It is one of several markers that Ukash is now a major player in the global prepaid industry with our rate of growth in volume and geography both moving at significant pace. It also demonstrates the growing popularity of prepaid products as a viable alternative for consumers. This is symptomatic of a shift in consumer behaviour as more of the public look to find safe and secure ways to shop online while maintaining control of their spending. Increasingly, they are turning to Ukash to provide the answers.

“For partners like MasterCard, our patented, regulated and proven technology is proving an attractive proposition for joint projects, which is a testament to our work and market position within the alternative payments industry.”

Ukash, MasterCard, prepaid, Maestro, alternative payments, rePower

Barclays Disc Array, ATM's and Online Banking Crash

Disc Array to Blame

ComputerWeekly.com

Barclays hardware failure brings down ATMs and online banking

Barclays cash machines, online banking and some counter services were inaccessible after a hardware failure yesterday.

Cash machines in the south of the country were not working and no services were available through telephone and online banking. Some services were unavailable at branch counters.

A spokesperson for Barclays said the problems had been caused by a failed disc array - a collection of hard drives built for storage. Engineers are currently working on getting "replacement cards", the spokesperson said.

Barclays added, "There is a technical issue affecting some of our systems. We have got engineers on site right now replacing the hardware." The hardware problems started at around 1pm on Tuesday, causing several systems to suffer. Customers in different parts of the country are affected in different ways, but telephone and online banking systems were down across the UK. "Customers will be able to speak to online banking staff, but no payments can be processed. It is possible to take money out over branch counters," a Barclays spokesperson said.

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Barclays, ATMs, online banking, disc array, cash machines

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

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