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Micropayments at a tipping point

July 18, 2006

ePaynews: POS-initiated payments of $5 or less are near a tipping point, a recent paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia states. Payment cards (credit, debit, prepaid and EBT) account for 38 percent of the dollar volume of transactions in the United States, and for 35 percent of the total number of transactions, the Nilson Report noted in December 2005. POS-initiated micropayments of under $5 (electronic and paper-based) generated more than $1 trillion in spending in 2003 with 400 billion transactions, according to TowerGroup, but the market is nascent with credit and debit card payments of under $5 totaling $13.5 billion in 2004.

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