Payments Watch

Here is a neat story: the City of Vaughn (just north of Toronto) has introduced the MuniCard Mastercard, a municipal credit card that allows residents to apply rewards to their municipal tax. I believe this is a first for North America, and when you think about it, is a logical next step in the evolving story of reward and affinity cards.
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Canadian Tire has announced that they are getting into the mortgage and chequing account business. They are following other retailers in offering core banking services, but with a twist - an “all in one account” that puts your mortgage, savings and chequing into a single pool of money.
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BillMonk announced the release of a new feature they call debt shuffling. It’s like net settlement for a group of people (e.g. a social or person to person network of friends). Makes one wonder why the concept of net settlement cannot be implemented at the individual business and person level.
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The Charlotte Observer writes about kiosks that allow shoppers to receive custom coupons by scanning their loyalty card as they enter the store. The coupons could be tailored to the purchasing patterns of the card holder. Why are these services not being offered by the credit card networks to merchants?
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Payments News reported on a piece in the Detroit Free Press regarding thoughtful use of one’s debit card. The gist is that one may over draft their account by using a debit card for purchases, resulting in one incurring overdraft fees. Here’s a thought: why can’t debit cards become credit cards when there is no more money in the account?
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According to this story, potentially thousands of shoppers at a mall in British Columbia may have had their debit card and PIN data stolen. In a way, this underlies a fundamental problem with the security of non-chip based cards. Making merchants liable may be one way to address this issue.
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I wonder if payment platforms that rely on biometrics, such as Pay by Touch, are susceptible to a functioning dummy finger print. For example, the German computer magazine c’t shows how such a dummy can be created with home made tools. Is there a better biometric for payments? How about vein patterns?
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Wow this didn’t take long - social finance site Buxfer has added peer to peer payments to its list of features by using Amazon’s new Flexible Payments Service (FPS). Hmmm, I wonder if they had access to some early Beta’s??? …I suppose it is only fitting that a first class application of Amazon’s FPS would be implemented at Internet speed.
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As anticipated, Amazon has launched its new payment service. Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) is being promoted by Amazon as being the “first payments service designed from the ground up specifically for developers”. It is a set of web services built on top of Amazon’s reliable and scalable payment infrastructure.
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Techcrunch is predicting a launch announcement by Amazon this week or next of a new web service around payments. If you had been following payments and IT related internet job boards, you may have been able to see this coming. For a couple months I have been wondering what “Project Iris” at Amazon was all about.
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