The shift to electronic vehicles continues, while mobile payment technologies attract interest.

Two recent surveys, the 2010 AFP Electronic Payments survey from AFP and the World Payments Report 2010 from a trio of organizations — CapGemini, RBS, and Efma (the European financial marketing association) — show a payments landscape that continues to grow, particularly in emerging markets, and shift from paper to electronic and mobile payment devices.

As its name indicates, The World Payments Report 2010 looks at retail and business payments globally. Around the world, noncash payments, such as those made with credit and debit cards, grew by 9 percent in 2008, the global downturn notwithstanding; this growth is expected to have continued into 2009. In fact, the U.K.’s Payments Council National Plan is set to phase out check usage in Great Britain by 2018. Countries showing the greatest growth in noncash payments were China, up 29 percent; South Africa at 25 percent; and Russia, up an eye-popping 66 percent. At the same time, the developed economies in North America, Europe, and Asia continue to account for more than three-quarters of the overall noncash payments market. more

Planning initiatives or (to use a more formal word) projects can be challenging. Most business is process- rather than project-oriented.

Processes are routine and have well-defined inputs. Making a widget requires these materials and so many labor hours. A sales call involves the following steps and these pieces of collateral. You execute the monthly close in a set pattern.

Projects or initiatives, on the other hand, are irregular in both time sequence and resources used. Projects are planned as discrete efforts while processes are recurring and routine and so do not require definition before they are started.

Laying out a project/initiative plan and the budget that goes with it may not be difficult. However, adapting the plan to changing circumstances, calculating the financial impact of those changes, and assessing performance to the plan can be time-consuming and ineffective if you don’t use the right software.

If initiatives or projects have a visible impact on your bottom line, you should look into improving the way you plan and review them. more

Compensation is shaping up as one of the top corporate risk management issues for 2012.

From a compliance standpoint, companies will need to adhere to Dodd-Frank – which certainly is no small task. Sarbanes-Oxley required the government and SEC to adopt 16 new regulations, notes Carol Beaumier, a Protiviti executive vice president, while Dodd-Frank calls for as many as 300 new regulations.

From a human capital standpoint, major overhauls to compensation strategies and programs – driven by new regulations and, more important, the strategic makeovers companies performed in response to the historic recession – will require scrutiny from a risk management perspective. more

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As if being named finance chief of General Motors Corp. before the age of 40 was not enough of a singular accomplishment, former GM CFO Ray Young earlier this year completed that rarest of all senior management career acts - he accepted a demotion.

As the vice president of GM international operations, Young found himself based in Shanghai, China – half a world away from Chris Liddell, the former Microsoft CFO who replaced him as GM’s finance chief. more

The draft proposals issued by the heads of the President’s deficit reduction panel call for scrapping the nation’s current system for taxation of foreign income and replacing it with a territorial system — i.e., one in which income earned outside of U.S. borders is not taxed. I asked international tax expert Shawn Carson, director with accounting firm CBIZ MHM, for his take on the proposals.

BizTaxBuzz: Just how complex does the current “worldwide” system get?

Shawn Carson: The basic premise is simple: Foreign companies pay U.S. tax if, and only if, they do business in the U.S. or receive income from the United States. U.S. shareholders of foreign companies, including U.S. multinationals with foreign subsidiaries, pay tax when they receive a dividend from them. U.S. ‘C’ corporations get a credit for any foreign tax paid by a foreign company, but U.S. individuals, partnerships, LLCs, and S corporations don’t. more