Billing Information Distributor for Protocol Translation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing electronic bill presentment and payment systems face challenges in accommodating multiple customer interfaces, communications protocols, and account and billing information data formats, leading to fragmentation and increased costs for both billers and customers.
Innovation Solution
A system and method that utilizes account and billing information distributors to coordinate and control the generation and distribution of account and billing information, providing a unified user interface for customers and enabling communication between billers and customers, regardless of the billing portal's attributes, through software that translates data formats and protocols, allowing for seamless access and payment of bills.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If multiple customer interfaces, communications protocols, and data formats are accommodated, then participation from billers and customers increases, but system complexity and costs increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a universal interface layer that acts as an intermediary between diverse billing systems and customer access points. This mediator translates various proprietary protocols and data formats into a standardized internal representation, allowing the system to accommodate multiple interfaces without increasing core system complexity. Each billing system communicates through its own protocol to the universal interface, which then presents a consistent interface to customers regardless of the underlying system variations.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent implements a universal interface that serves multiple functions: it provides a standardized customer interface, translates between different communication protocols, handles various data formats, and enables both direct and indirect access methods. This multi-functional universal interface eliminates the need for separate specialized interfaces for each billing system type, thereby reducing overall system complexity while maintaining high adaptability.
2Adaptability or versatility
If multiple customer interfaces and protocols are supported, then more billers and customers can participate, but implementation costs increase
Solution Approach 1:
The universal interface layer serves as a cost-effective intermediary that bills systems pay to implement once, rather than requiring each billing system to implement multiple specialized interfaces. The mediator handles all protocol translation and data format conversion centrally, reducing the total implementation cost across the ecosystem by avoiding redundant development work at each endpoint.
Solution Approach 2:
By implementing a single universal interface that handles multiple protocols and data formats, the system eliminates the need for multiple separate interface implementations. This multi-functional approach reduces implementation costs by consolidating what would otherwise require separate development, testing, and maintenance efforts for each interface type.
3Ease of operation
If a unified user interface is provided, then ease of operation improves, but the system must handle diverse data formats internally
Solution Approach 1:
The universal interface acts as an intermediary layer that presents a consistent, simplified user interface to customers while handling the complexity of diverse data formats internally. The mediator translates various billing data formats into a standardized internal representation before presenting information to the customer, thereby maintaining ease of operation without exposing the user to underlying data format variations.
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements local quality by providing a standardized interface at the customer interaction point while allowing diverse data formats at the billing system level. The universal interface maintains consistent local behavior for customers regardless of the underlying system variations, while the internal translation layer handles the diversity without affecting the user experience.
Data Source
AI summary
In a system and method for enabling electronic bill presentment and payment and account and billing distribution, one or more intermediaries are provided to coordinate and control account and billing information transfer among multiple supplying entities and multiple recipient entities including billing portals and consolidators. The distributor provides software to the suppliers and recipients including billing portals that includes a user interface to a billable entity associated with a billing portal. The user interface presents account and billing information to the billable entity and enables payment of bills in response to receiving instructions from the billable entity. Billing information can include the combination of summary billing information and detailed billing contact information. The distributor also provides software to billing entities to expedite the gathering of billing information from the billing entities.