Distributed payment and loyalty processing for retail and vending
First Claim
1. A method for providing offline payment and loyalty capability in which the customer account information is stored in a nonvolatile memory on a terminal at one or more merchant locations and comprising:
- one or more secure servers or host systems, a data network connecting the one or more servers to the one or more terminals, a customer account identifier, shared secret information used of customer account security, and customer account information is referenced in the nonvolatile memory by a cryptographic hash of a customer account identifier, optional other security codes, and some shared secret information.
6 Assignments
0 Petitions
Accused Products
Abstract
The system described is an electronic payment and loyalty systems for retail and automatic unattended vending. In particular the invention relates to an electronic payment and loyalty system wherein the customer account information is cached in a nonvolatile memory on the payment terminal or point of sale system while addressing the problems of securely storing customer account information, operation of the system during a failure of the server or network, and the use of customer account synchronization scheduling to limit merchant fraud risk in a network or retail locations and to maximize the peak transaction capacity of the available server and network infrastructure. When the customer account information is not available at the payment terminal, transactions are processed with an online connection to the payment server. The invention allows customers to use and fund electronic stored value accounts at merchant locations without the need for an online connection to the payment system server.
451 Citations
45 Claims
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1. A method for providing offline payment and loyalty capability in which the customer account information is stored in a nonvolatile memory on a terminal at one or more merchant locations and comprising:
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one or more secure servers or host systems, a data network connecting the one or more servers to the one or more terminals, a customer account identifier, shared secret information used of customer account security, and customer account information is referenced in the nonvolatile memory by a cryptographic hash of a customer account identifier, optional other security codes, and some shared secret information. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23)
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24. A method for providing offline payment and loyalty capability in which the customer account information is stored in a nonvolatile memory on a terminal at one or more merchant locations and where the customer can use and fund a stored value or prepaid account and comprising:
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one or more servers or host systems one or more payment terminals at merchant retail locations a data network connecting the one or more servers to the one or more terminals, and a customer account identifier. - View Dependent Claims (25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45)
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Specification