Dave Birch at the excellent Digital Money Forum discusses how at a time in the not so distant past Americans reverted to Barter. In fact with no real money around in the Great Depression, people started to print their own money, called “scrip”.
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Bruce Schneier comments on an article about how rising gas prices and the caps on card transactions authorized at the pump can cause pumps to shut off mid-fill.
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How many customers does PayPal have, and how often do they use the service? How does this compare to a big bank? An article on PayPal’s Nebraska operations centre provides some interesting insight into the use of PayPal:
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The adoption of smart card technology in North America is beset by a “chicken and egg” conundrum. To accept smart cards would require merchants to retool their card reading equipment even though the swiping of the magnetic stripe currently serves them well. Here is one way to get merchants to adopt smart card technology:
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The Bank of Montreal (BMO), announced today the launch of the Prepaid Travel Mosaik MasterCard, which they are promoting as an alternative to traveller’s cheques.
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It seems like if you want to reinvigorate anything these days you simply put “2.0″ after it and it magically becomes cutting edge, cool and “now” - definitely demanding of one’s attention if they are on top of the most current trends. It would seem that even the conservative banking industry is not immune from the desire to 2.0-ify itself. What is particularly annoying is when the “2.0″ is just blatant marketing.
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EMV is a standard for authenticating credit and debit card payments when using chip cards (”smart cards”) and chip card capable POS terminals. This standard was originally developed by Europay, Mastercard and Visa (and hence the term “EMV”). The main benefit of EMV is improved security and a reduction in fraudulent card use.
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Verizon announced today that customers can Leave The Cash At Home – Obopay Will Give Verizon Wireless Subscribers The Option To Shop With Their Phones. It was worthwhile to actually read the press release to see how all of this would work.
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Without even touching on the social aspects of Wesabe, the basic personal finance tracking is very impressive. As a web based application, it may surprise you how easy it is to track your transactions, and in my own humble opinion, the (at times self learning) tagging mechanism makes it superior to such desktop products as Quicken.
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You would like to track your spending, share your experiences with money, get help and help others in a community setting. You want to do this because you would like to make better financial decisions leveraging the experience of others. Welcome to the world of social finance - the web 2.0 version of personal finance tracking. There are several sites out there to help you achieve these goals. What follows are instructions on how to get started by setting yourself up on the popular Wesabe site.
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Payments are big business. Total industry revenues are over $200 Billion, almost double the revenues of the entire airline industry. Payments Watch provides insight and analysis on payments industry news from around the world.
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