Automatic Billing Enrollment System for Secure Merchant Onboarding
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current systems lack the ability to automatically enroll merchants in bill payment applications based on actual purchase transactions, leading to inefficiencies and security concerns with pull-type payments.
Innovation Solution
An automatic billing enrollment (ABE) computing device that communicates with a payment network to identify merchants from payment transactions, determines enrollment status, and facilitates enrollment into a cardholder's bill pay application by retrieving and inputting required data elements.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If pull-type payments are used for merchant transactions, then merchants can initiate and access fund transfers, but security risks increase and cardholder data must be shared with merchants
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an automatic billing enrollment (ABE) system as an intermediary between merchants and cardholder bill pay applications. This mediator automatically enrolls merchants in the bill pay application based on purchase transactions, eliminating the need for manual enrollment while maintaining security. The ABE system receives transaction data, identifies merchants, and automatically adds them to the cardholder's bill pay application, thus resolving the contradiction between security and ease of operation.
2Productivity
If manual merchant enrollment in bill pay applications is implemented, then enrollment accuracy can be maintained, but time consumption and operational complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements a self-service mechanism where the system automatically enrolls merchants without requiring manual intervention. The ABE system monitors purchase transactions, automatically identifies merchants who should be enrolled in the bill pay application, and completes the enrollment process autonomously. This self-service approach dramatically increases enrollment speed while the system manages the complexity internally, resolving the contradiction between productivity and device complexity.
3Reliability
If centralized database for merchant enrollment is implemented, then data consistency is improved, but system complexity and implementation difficulty increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges the merchant enrollment functionality into the existing bill pay application infrastructure. The ABE system consolidates transaction data, merchant identification, and enrollment management into a unified centralized database that works seamlessly with the bill pay application. This merging approach ensures data consistency across the system while managing complexity through integration rather than separate systems, resolving the contradiction between reliability and device complexity.
Data Source
AI summary
An automatic billing enrollment (ABE) computing device and methods for automatically enrolling a merchant in a bill paying application are provided. The ABE computing device receives a payment transaction associated with a cardholder account, identifies a merchant associated with the payment transaction, and determines whether the merchant is enrolled with a bill pay application associated with the cardholder account by performing a database lookup of enrolled merchants. The ABE computing device then transmits a message to a user device associated with the cardholder account indicating that the identified merchant is not enrolled by the cardholder with the bill pay application and includes an option for the cardholder to enroll the merchant. To enroll the merchant, the ABE computing device determines merchant-associated data elements required by the bill pay application to enroll the merchant, retrieves the data elements, and inputs the data elements into the bill pay application.