NEW YORK– ACI Worldwide announced this morning it has offered to acquire S1 Corp., which could scotch a month-old merger of S1 and Fundtech.

Observers have speculated that now that ISIS has signed on card networks Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express to work with its telecom members AT&T, T-Mobile USA and Verizon on mobile payments, it will muscle out competing scheme Google Wallet. To date, Google has signed on one card network, MasterCard, and one telecom operator, Sprint, as well as Citi, First Data and sixteen merchants as tenant partners.

HARRISBURG, Penn. – Mid-Atlantic Corporate FCU has selected ZixCorp E-Mail Encryption Services to maintain the security of sensitive information.

Signaling the opening of a new market for Chinese manufacturers and retailers, Alibaba Group Ltd. is working with Western Union to develop an online payment platform, the Chinese business-to-business e-commerce specialist announced earlier this month.

Suvidha Starnet Pvt. Ltd. will invest more than 5 billion rupees (US$113 million or 80 million euros) to expand the operations of its Beam mobile-wallet service, a sign of the growing confidence in India’s mobile-payments market.

Varying opinions exist on how quickly mobile payments will grow in the U.S., but payments executives generally believe the technology could become a mainstream option for purchasing goods and services within 36 months, new survey data suggest.

The smartphone market is maturing rapidly, but banks risk getting left behind because a growing number of users consider the channel to be unsafe for financial transactions.

Venture capitalists face a surplus of investment options in the financial technology sector.

USAA has already processed nearly $4 billion in mobile banking transactions in the two years it has offered its Deposit@Mobile smartphone app. The company is now expanding this service, which lets customers deposit checks by snapping pictures of them with their mobile device, to the iPad 2 and plotting a new wave of digital banking products.

Two-year-old mobile payment startup Dwolla has gone from zero to $1 million per day in transactions.

A federal court has ordered Swish Marketing Inc. to pay more than $4.8 million for tricking hundreds of thousands of payday loan applicants into paying for an unrelated debit card.

BATON ROUGE, La. – E FCU has upgraded its fiVISION accountWORKS technology to the company’s new accountWORKS 2G.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – CommonWealth One FCU has implemented FinanceWorks, a financial management solution from Intuit Financial Services, to provide consumers a way to budget, gain control over their spending and save more during these tough economic times.

A slowdown in inflows at foreign entities appears to have played a role in the biggest jump in deposits at domestically-chartered banks in more than two years.

Credit card issuers wanting to improve profitability in the wake of the recession could get better results by looking more closely at their own fraud cases to determine specifically which type of fraud criminals are perpetrating and how to stop it, new research from Experian PLC suggests.

Buoyed by the fast uptake of smartphones and tablets in the country, First National Bank Ltd. says it has become the first financial institution in South Africa to offer a mobile-banking application to its customers.

The former marketing executive of the publisher of the Guitar Hero and Call of Duty video games is now running BillMyParents Inc.’s marketing operations, the online payments company announced July 21.

Though contactless payments have long been advertised for their ease of use, recent trials have departed from that premise. Some banks are putting the focus back on simplicity — and making payments as easy as a flick of the wrist.

Bolstered by a resurgence in consumer spending and improving credit quality, American Express Co. on July 21 reported higher second-quarter income and revenues–and a steep increase in its marketing and rewards-program costs.

As the hype for widespread Near Field Communication-enabled mobile payments continues to heat up, eBay Inc.’s CEO doused some cold water on the concept, suggesting instead that large merchants will resist the unproven technology.