Also In The News

  * The U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Management Service has chosen Comerica Bank to provide nationwide prepaid debit card services to unbanked recipients of Social Security and other federal funds, such as veteran or railroad retirement benefits. The bureau says it chose Dallas-based Comerica, in part, because of its experience as a prepaid card issuer for benefit recipients of state governments. Comerica works with Dallas-based Affiliated Computer Services Inc., which provides card-processing support for state-government agencies. The bureau has not decided whether the cards will carry the Visa or MasterCard logo, says a department spokesperson.
  * One-fourth of American adults missed making one or more bill-payment due dates last year, with the bulk of those delinquencies occurring on payments for credit cards (12%), utilities (12%) and medical services (11%), new survey data suggest. TransUnion’s TrueCredit.com telephone survey of 1,004 consumers, which GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media conducted Dec. 14 to 16, also found 17% of respondents said they chose paying down debt–including credit card balances–as their top resolutions for 2008, down from 22% who said so in a similar survey in 2006.
  * A customer of United Kingdom-based issuer Halifax reportedly plans to sue the bank because, he claims, criminals cloned his chip-based payment card and stole £2,100 (US$4,100) from his account at ATMs. Halifax did not offer immediate comment. Most UK chip cards carry “static data authentication,” a version of the international EMV smart card standard. Such cards carry a permanent digital signature easier to clone than the unique digital signatures offered by “dynamic data authentication,” a more expensive security feature for EMV cards.
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