In ecommerce and money news

Click4Advisor, provider of voice commerce solution for the phone advice industry, today launched an All-Blind Phone Conference Service. Since 2004, Click4Advisor has been a world leader, providing individual Advisors and Group Managers the solution to offer double-blind advice-based telephone commerce. Click4Advisor's new Telephone Conference Service provides complete privacy and anonymity to Host ("Advisor") and Participants ("Users"). Read more

Nassim Taleb, author of "The Black Swan”, is convinced that in order to reach more stable environment now, in the middle of financial crisis, government of USA must convert debt into equity. "You may have green shoots, whatever you want to call them, you may have temporary relief, but you are still in a world that's breaking," Taleb said. Read more

MoBank has announced that it is launching a bespoke hosting platform in association with NTT Europe Online, a global managed hosting, security and application management services provider. With multi-tiered firewall protection, anti-virus and intrusion-prevention technology, the NTT Europe Online's managed hosting platform is compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) to protect users' sensitive personal data. Read more

Accusations on compelling customers into unnecessary expensive products have been denied by Bank of America Corp. The National Association of Consumer Advocates and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group blamed Bank of America and other big banks in paying fees for pressuring consumers into dubious, high-cost programs like "credit protection" and "overdraft protection."   Read more

First American Payment Systems, L.P., one of the fastest-growing electronic payments processors in the U.S., today announced that it has signed American National Bank of Texas as a referral partner. Under this partnership, American National Bank of Texas promotes First American as the exclusive payment processing provider to its merchant clients. Read more

Rixty just made paying for online entertainment without a credit card easier. The innovative e-commerce company launched today its new cash-based payment system at more than 10,000 retail locations. Now anyone with cash and coins can convert that money into online purchasing power across an exciting array of entertainment merchants. Read more

Attracting customers into higher borrowing by credit card firms will be outlawed by the Consumer White Paper to be published today. Particularly, raising credit limits without the prior approval of customers will be prohibited while credit card firms will be obliged to stop sending unsolicited credit card cheques through the post. Moreover, rise of interest rates on existing debts will be unlawful for credit card firms while they will be retained from putting repayments towards the cheapest debts.   Read more

The global money transfer services leader Western Union on Thursday revealed its intention to strengthen its global consumer loyalty program, The Western Union® Gold Card, with the convenience of a reloadable Visa® prepaid card. The new service is to be offered from July and targeted 8 million Western Union Gold Card loyalty members in the USA.  Read more

ProShares, part of ProFunds Group, has assigned J.P. Morgan Worldwide Securities Services to service eight newly established international exchange traded funds of ProShares.  64 of ProShares’ equity and fixed income ETFs with total assets of $25 billion are already offered by custody, fund accounting and fund administration practices provided by J.P. Morgan WSS. The number of ProShares ETFs serviced by J.P. Morgan now totals 72.  Read more

The Asian Real Estate Association with the European Association for Investors conducted the Investment Intentions Asia Survey 2009 in Non-Listed Real Estate Vehicles and the Pension Real Estate Association. The survey showed that many investors are regularly getting on a plane to Australia this year. The reason is that the investor interest had been generated by Australia's falling property prices and the lower Australian dollar. Read more

Under the pressure of probable examination of online advertising by Congress and the Federal Trade Commission, trade associations representing 5,000 companies have adopted new guidelines regarding the track of consumer behavior for advertising purposes. The consortium which comprises the American Association of Advertising Agencies, Association of National Advertisers, and other agencies are promising to make the tracking of consumer behavior transparent.  Read more

According to the Reuters report, small-business credit card lender that a month earlier cut off 1 million accounts, Advanta Corp, was ordered by the FDIC to refund as much as $35 million to customers because of alleged "unsafe or unsound" practices and to plan to stop taking bank deposits. One agreement addressed allegations that Advanta break federal trade laws through its pricing strategies on business credit cards and in its marketing of cash-back rewards on the cards. Read more

As the government announced Thursday in the report, US employers reduced 467,000 jobs in June, that appeared to become 100,000 greater than expected 363,000. At the same time, the unemployment rate rose to 9.5%.  As the Labor Department results showed 8,000 fewer jobs were lost in April and May than it was previously reported. Thus, the May job losses were revised downward to 322,000, while the April losses were revised upward to 519,000. Read more

The survey of the FaceTime Communications, the leading provider of solutions enabling the safe use of Web 2.0 and unified communications in the enterprise, sais that Social Networking is widely accepted by IT respondents, and 51 % plan to beef up security within the next 12 months. Many more IT professionals are reporting that social media is in use at their companies, up from 60 % six months ago to 85 % now. Read more

During a presentation at the SyScan conference in Singapore on Thursday, security research Charlie Miller said that Apple is working to patch an iPhone vulnerability that could allow an attacker to remotely install and run unsigned software code with root access to the phone. The attack in question exploits a weakness in the way iPhones handle text messages received via SMS. Read more

As the severe economy times come upon the shoulders of ordinary people scammers are trying to take advantage of others’ despair and difficult conditions by offering them promising jobs that don’t exist, get-rich-quick schemes, debt-reduction scams and other phony services. On Wednesday the Federal Trade Commission announced a major crackdown on fraudsters to help Americans avoid being entrapped. Read more

Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei said that China hopes for diversification of the international currency system in the future, and it would be "normal" for the issue to be raised for discussion at next week's Group of Eight summit in Italy. According to G8 sources, Beijing had asked for a debate on proposals for a new global reserve currency at the G8 summit and the issue could be referred to briefly in the summit statement. Read more

According to a research conducted by Bankrate.com today when it comes to credit card practices Discover Financial Services has relatively mild rules. The personal finance Web site studied two cards each from the top 10 issuers, including Discover More and Discover Motiva. Thus, in case a cardholder violates any part of the credit agreement all issuers would surely fine him/her. Tell your opinion

On Thursday bullion slipped toward $930 per ounce, weakening as the greenback strengthened broadly ahead of monthly U.S. jobs data that investors expect to provide more clarity on the pace of economic recovery. At 6:41 a.m. Thursday morning spot gold steadied at $932.05. EDT, down from $939.95 late Wednesday in New York. Gold found support above $930 as investors awaited U.S. non-farm payrolls data at 8:30 a.m. EDT which could dictate moves for the dollar and gold. Read more

  Thursday Asian stocks ended mostly lower with investors locking in profits ahead of US jobs data due out later in the day.  Thus, Japan's Nikkei 225 Average closed at 9876.15 down 0.6%, at the same time Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index lost 1.1% to finish at 18178.05 as trading resumed after Wednesday's holiday. South Korea's Kospi ended flat and New Zealand's NZX 50 closed 0.4% lower. Read more