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An American Banker article discusses the Payment Card Industry's July 1st compliance deadline, highlighting concerns about retailer readiness. Payments consultant Paul Martaus estimates that around 20% of retailers will likely remain non-compliant by the deadline. This non-compliance is partly due to many retailers using outdated terminals incapable of supporting PCI-compliant applications.

Merchants can enable direct payments from Facebook and Twitter by using a secure payment page link provided by their merchant account provider. This link, essentially a URL with account parameters, can be posted on social media platforms like Facebook walls or Twitter feeds. Customers clicking the link are then directed to a secure payment page to complete their transactions.

Movie tickets, gift cards, coupons, and airline tickets are now accessible on cell phones, reflecting a growing trend in mobile commerce. Retailers and technology companies are driving this shift, aiming to replace traditional paper and plastic with digital mobile alternatives. This movement is pushing society closer to a future of the mobile wallet, where most transactions are conducted via smartphones.

Desktop applications are struggling to meet increasingly strict PCI DSS regulations for credit card payments, leading to compliance challenges. Two solutions are presented: rewriting the entire application for PCI compliance, which is costly and ongoing, or outsourcing the payment processing to a PCI-compliant vendor via an embedded secure webpage. The latter option simplifies compliance by reducing PCI scope and utilizes tokenization for secure and efficient future transactions within the desktop application.

Amazon introduced PayPhrase, a service allowing customers to pay using a pin and phrase, accessing stored payment details without entering credit card numbers directly. This new service is similar to tokenized payments, emphasizing security by storing sensitive information on Amazon's servers. However, the article suggests that businesses could achieve similar tokenized payment solutions more affordably by using standard payment processors instead of Amazon PayPhrase due to potentially lower fees.