Western Union, Consumer Portfolio Service and VeriSign Team to Offer Mobile Bill Payment Solution
"The Western Union Company, together with Consumer Portfolio Services Inc. (CPS) and VeriSign’s Messaging and Mobile Media Division, today announced a pilot project enabling CPS customers to trigger their monthly car payment directly from their mobile phone. Unlike mobile payment services that direct the consumer to a website or interactive voice response system (IVR), the new service allows consumers to quickly and easily initiate their payment using their phone’s text messaging service based on debit or credit card information entered online."

M-Com and Fawry team on mobile banking in Egypt
"Based on M-Com's globally leading mobile payments and banking solution - BankAnywhere - Fawry Banking and Payment Technology Services will enable banks to offer a broad range of mobile payment, alerting and banking services to their customer base."

Fronde Anywhere Expands Presence in Asia
"Fronde Anywhere, the leading provider of innovative mobile payment, banking and security products is expanding its in-market presence in Southeast Asia. 'Our solutions really seem to be hitting the mark with clients in Asia’', says Caroline Dewe, CEO, Fronde Anywhere, 'our partnership with Logica in this region has proven very successful in generating regional references for all our offerings and we are expanding our on the ground resource in order to further increase our Southeast Asian footprint.'"

NCR Unleashes Remote Check Deposit by Using Mobile Phone Cameras
"NCR Corporation is allowing consumers to deposit checks safely from wherever they can get reception on their data-enabled mobile phones, such as an iPhone or Blackberry. The company today announced an agreement with Mitek Systems, Inc., an innovator of image analytics and mobile imaging software, to integrate Mitek's ImageNet Mobile Deposit software into NCR's APTRA Passport family of remote deposit capture solutions."

I apologize for having missed a few days but I was in New York attending the Finovate 2007 conference. If you haven't had an opportunity to hear much about the event you can read my notes at the Mobile Money and Banking site. I hate to belabor the point, but if you were not able to attend please make sure that it's on your calendar for next year. Over the course of a day I was able to meet with a number of vendors including: mFoundry, Clairmail, M-Com, SRM Technologies, Sybase, Firethorn, and YellowPepper. I met fellow bankers from Citi, JP Morgan Chase, Capital One, ABSA, and ECCU. Plus, had the pleasure of spending time with a number of interesting bloggers including: Christophe Langlois, Paul Ruppert, Jim Bruene, and William Azaroff.

But now it's back to business. Here's the news:

Firethorn and CheckFree to Provide Arvest Bank Group Mobile Banking and Payments

Google Is Really, Really Serious About The Mobile Ad Market

Cell Phones Double As Electronic Wallets

CPNI Extends Access to Mobile Purchases

Fronde Anywhere to reach world through LogicaCMG

S1 Enterprise Announces Mobile Banking Solution