The best thing about mobile payment apps is not the speed of transactions made with phones, but how the apps let people manage their accounts on their own instead of wasting time at the register, according to early results from retailers.

MECHANICSBURG, Penn. – Members 1st FCU has installed 3VR Security’s P-Series SmartRecorder surveillance solution to cut investigation time and increase prosecution success.

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. – BayPort CU has signed with Intuit Financial Services (formerly Digital Insight) to offer FinanceWorks financial management solution.

Widespread use of contactless payment in the U.S. remains three to five years away because merchants and issuers still lack compelling incentives to promote the technology, experts concluded recently at the Smart Card Alliance’s annual conference in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Some 8,200 full-time students attend Columbus (Ga.) State University, and generally 7,700 are logged in at any particular time to a mobile application that enables their smartphones to serve as electronic campus identification cards that support payment and other functions, schools officials say.

Gemalto NV will continue its long-term partnership with Orange by providing the Near Field Communication payment technology to the France-based mobile-network operator’s phones, the chip maker has announced.

USBSwiper.com, which developed a card-swipe device for PayPal transactions, is on the hunt to expand its sales, Richard Freedkin, the company’s co-founder, tells PaymentsSource.

MADISON, Wis.-The CUNA Technology Council has released a white paper addresses social media from a technology perspective.

Wanna-be fraudsters are just an Internet connection away from downloading free, effective hacking tools from criminal websites and file-sharing programs. Security experts outlined five do-it-yourself hacking tools that can pack a punch against CUs and members.

WEST JORDAN, Utah-Imagine sifting through 1,000 red flags before you find one financial transaction that is actually fraudulent. That's what Mountain America Credit Union (MACU) here was trying to do every couple days, until it switched out fraud detection systems in July.

BROCKTON, Mass.-HarborOne CU's new CTO sings an uncommon chantey: integrate, integrate, integrate. It's a tune HarborOne will hear again and again during its three-year sea change in technology, according to Wayne Dunn, SVP and CTO at the $1.8-billion CU.

VIENNA, Va.-Navy FCU here has the technology it needs to send automated responses to the 34,000 e-mails and social networking posts it sees every month. But when it comes to social sites like Twitter, the CU chooses to respond by hand.

LEXINGTON, Ky.-Members are saying "yes" to courtesy pay by opting-in online at credit union websites, giving CUs hope that overdraft revenue will remain intact even after the Fed's Regulation E (Reg E) takes effect.

ROCKVILLE, Md.-An Apple iPod digital music player can download 160 gigabytes of data. Each database at Energy Federal Credit Union here contains up to five gigabytes of confidential member data. Put the 160 and the five together, and you've got a potential data breach.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said it is eager to deploy chip-and-PIN card technology as a stronger barrier against point of sale card fraud but that card issuers are balking.

ENDICOTT, N.Y. – Visions FCU has rolled out an enhanced mobile test and banking program the provides members with access their savings and loan balances, and allows them to transfer funds and make loan payments directly from the Visions mobile banking site, using almost any cell phone.

WEST JORDAN, Utah – Mountain America CU has installed Memento Inc.’s Memento Security platform to combat deposit account fraud and improve compliance operations.

"Credit unions can be more exposed to fraud loss due to their funds-availability policies, which are based on the premise that credit unions are smaller and know their members better," said the general manager of banking solutions for Memento Security.

ROCKVILLE, Md.-TriGeo does more than aggregate logs and detect network violations, said Ted Carmack, information services manager at Energy FCU.

BROCKTON, Mass.-HarborOne's three-year technology transformation started in early 2009 with an infrastructure overhaul, said Wayne Dunn, SVP and CTO. "For example, we moved from physical servers to virtualization and a Storage Area Network. We put in a Multiprotocol Label Switching connection."