Billing and Payment

Abstract

In 1871, Western Union introduced its electronic money transfer service based on its telegraph network. Roughly one hundred years later, in 1977, the first financial message was sent over the SWIFT [1] network. Today, the ubiquitous internet allows people to make transactions 24 hours a day, from almost any place in the world. While the communication networks constitute a very important infrastructure for billing and payment procedures, patent applications often address payment schemes and protocols located on upper levels of the ISO network layer model. Payment processes normally involve electronic links between parties as intermediaries, like banks or credit card companies. Even direct payments schemes between two persons typically involve membership of a third party organisational unit which has to map virtual transactions into real monetary systems. Patent applications in this field are at risk of being too abstract, of being of purely financial nature, or of being considered to be obvious in view of existing communication infrastructure. The following examples concern patent applications in the International Patent Classification (IPC) class G06Q20/00 (Payment schemes, architectures or protocols).