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AssigneeMetavante Corporation
InventorsEric W. Jamison, David S. Fortney, Dhaval A. Vasavada, Alexander Kosowski
Estimating the term…
An integrated electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) system is disclosed which obtains bills for customers (which include individuals, businesses, and organizations) and allow payments including payments by credit card to be processed at the biller websites on behalf of customers. The integrated EBPP system obtains bills for customers from paper billers, electronic billers, and scrape-enabled biller websites, with customers providing access information for biller websites to the integrated EBPP system, which uses a software agent or bot to make scheduled scrapes of biller websites to obtain customer bills. The integrated EBPP system enables customers to automatically set up a user account at biller websites, with customers providing user access information and user financial account information, such as a credit card or debit card, for accessing biller websites and for initiating payments at biller websites.
An electronic bill payment system comprising:
An electronic bill presentment and payment system comprising:
An electronic bill payment system, comprising:
A method of paying bills via the Internet, comprising:
A method of paying bills via the Internet, comprising:
A method of paying bills via the Internet, comprising:
A method of paying bills via the Internet, comprising:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.
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Commerce: billing or invoicing
Payment architectures, schemes or protocols: payment circuits
Payment architectures: specially adapted for electronic funds transfer [EFT] systems; specially adapted for home banking systems
Specially adapted for electronic funds transfer [EFT] systems; specially adapted for home banking systems: bill distribution or payments
Term end not estimated
Field of the invention
The present invention relates generally to electronic bill presentment and payment (“EBPP”) systems and more particularly to EBPP systems that obtains bills for customers (which include individuals, businesses, and organizations) and allow payments including payments by credit card to be processed at the biller websites on behalf of customers.
EBPP and its predecessors have been in development for nearly twenty years, dating back to the advent of Electronic Data Interchange (“EDI”) and private corporate networks. EBPP is a process that enables bills to be created, delivered, and paid over the Internet. EBPP has applications for many industries, from financial service providers to telecommunications and utilities companies.
These and other advantages of the present invention are best understood with reference to the drawings, in which:
FIG. 1 is an block diagram showing an overview of the integrated EBPP system of the present invention;
FIG. 2 is a flowchart showing the general operation of scraping capabilities provided by the system illustrated in FIG. 1;
The present invention provides a bill center which is capable of making payments on biller websites on behalf of customers, using customer financial accounts including credit card accounts. In the preferred embodiment, the bill payment system of the present invention is an integrated EBPP system in which the bill center also includes bill presentment. In this regard, the bill center interacts with a paper delivery network to collect and convert paper bills to electronic bills, an electronic delivery network to receive bills in electronic form, and an agent or bot program for “scraping” bill data from biller websites using a customer access information. The integration of these sources of customer bills enables the customer to log onto a centralized bill center, retrieve his/her bills, and have the bill center settle the bills on his/her behalf using a plurality of payment options.
With regard to scraping bill data, a customer of the integrated EBPP system of the present invention inputs his/her user access information used to access the biller website. The integrated EBPP system then uses the user access information to access the biller website on a scheduled basis, obtain the customer's bills from the biller website, and store the bill on the integrated EBPP system. The integrated EBPP system integrates information from the scraped bills, together with other data that it obtains for the customer via other methods (e.g., paper bills and direct electronic bills) into items of bill data that it maintains for the customer.
If the customer does not have the user access information necessary to access biller websites for scraping, the integrated EBPP system prompts the customer to enter information necessary to set up a user account at the biller website. Then using the customer-entered user account information, the integrated EBPP system sets up a user account at the biller website and scrapes the bills from the biller website for the customer.