Methods, devices and systems for electronic bill presentment and payment

#1. Field of the Invention

#This invention relates to the electronic presentment and payment of bills. In particular, the present invention relates to methods, devices and systems that provide a powerful, automated and flexible infrastructure for electronically presenting, processing, viewing and paying bills and other requests for payment over a computer network, such as the Internet.

#2. Description of the Related Art

#For a further understanding of the objects and advantages of the present invention, reference should be made to the following detailed description, taken in conjunction with the accompanying figures, in which:

#FIG. 1 shows an example of a paper-based bill generation and payment cycle.

#FIG. 2 shows an electronic bill generation and payment cycle, according to an embodiment of the present invention.

#The present invention includes electronic bill presentment and payment methods, devices and systems. As shown in FIG. 4, the present invention may be implemented as a database 400 comprising a first, second and third areas 420, 430 and 440, respectively. In the description to follow, the first area 420 may also be referenced as a staging area, the second area 430 as an active area and the third area 440 may be referenced as an archive area, for reasons to be detailed below. As shown in FIG. 4, the staging area 420, the active area 430 and the archive area 430 each may be a sub-database of the database 400 or each may be a functionally separate database linked to one another at least in the manner shown by the arrows 427, 428, 437 and 438.

#According to the present invention, billers (e.g., bill-generating entities, such as credit card companies, utilities, mortgage companies, for example) have the option of transmitting bill data 402 and/or bill format data 404 to the electronic presentment and payment database 400. The bill data 402 may include, for example, a customer identifier, an amount due and a date due for each of the biller's customers that have opted to pay their bills electronically. Other information may also be included in the bill data 402 including, for example, account balance, minimum payment and customer service information, for example. The bill data stream 402 may be coded according to any number of formats such as, for example, the Open Financial Exchange (OFX) format (available at the OFX home page on the World Wide Web), the specification of which is incorporated herewith by reference. OFX is a broad-based framework for exchanging financial data and instructions between customers and their financial institutions. Other formats for the bill data stream 402 may include ASCII, eXtensible Markup Language (XML), print streams or other legacy or proprietary formats. Appropriate translators may be positioned between the bill data 402 and the staging area 420 to insure a uniform format for the incoming bill data stream 402. For example, a format translator(s) may be incorporated in an application program interface (API) disposed at the input of the staging area 420, for example. The bill data stream 402 may include summary and/or detail bill data on each customer, for each biller. The bill format data 404 may include HTML-formatted data configured to mimic the “look-and-feel” of the biller's traditional paper bills, when rendered on a display device. For example, the biller's fonts, background color scheme, graphic design(s) and/or layout may be reproduced in the bill format data 404. Alternatively, additional visual cues may be incorporated in the bill format data 404 that are not possible using paper bills. For example, flashing backgrounds or other animation may draw the customer's attention to a particular area of his or her computer screen as the bill is displayed. Alternatively, or in addition to HTML, the bill format data 404 may include functionality programmed in Extensible Markup Language (XML). A Java language program may also be developed to read such XML-formatted bill format data 404 and/or bill data stream 402 to generate an input stream suitable to be loaded into a database (such as an Oracle Corp. database, for example), via mechanisms such as Oracle's SQL*Loader utility or other Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) utilities.

#The bill data 402 may include bill summary data and/or bill detail data, among other information. According to an embodiment of the present invention, the bill summary data and the bill detail data may be logically organized as tables, such as shown at references 422 and 424 in the staging area 420. A bill data validation procedure may be carried out to insure the integrity of the bill data 402 transmitted by the biller. This validation procedure may include, for example, verification of the customer's identity, verification of the integrity of the transmitted data and/or verification that all required fields (such as amount and/or date due, for example) have been properly populated. If a problem occurs during the loading of the bill data 402 and/or the bill format data 404, the data may be dropped, to prevent corrupted data from being swapped from the staging area 420 to the active area 430. Likewise, should an error be discovered during the validation process, the bill data 402 and/or the bill format data 404 may be purged from the staging area 420. Preferably, customers should not have access to the staging area 420 of the bill presentment and payment database 400.