Online Account Statement Hyperlinked Special Offers
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current online credit card account websites do not effectively link special offers to specific transaction history entries, missing opportunities for merchants to engage customers with related or competing products and services, and fail to provide customers with relevant promotions.
Innovation Solution
A server-side application that provides online account statements with hyperlinked special offer indicia directly related to transaction entries, allowing customers to access special offers from merchants based on their transaction history, enabling merchants to promote related or competing products and services, and allowing customers to self-serve and resolve billing disputes.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If hyperlinked special offer indicia are added to transaction history entries, then customer engagement and merchant opportunities increase, but system complexity and data processing requirements increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system pre-processes transaction data during statement generation to identify matching special offers, rather than performing this matching in real-time when the customer views the statement. This preliminary action reduces the complexity of the viewing operation while maintaining the enhanced customer engagement feature.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces an intermediary processing layer that matches transaction entries with special offer databases using algorithms that compare merchant names, categories, and transaction details. This intermediary layer handles the complex matching logic separately, allowing the core statement generation and viewing functions to remain relatively simple while still providing personalized special offers.
2Loss of information
If special offers are matched and linked to specific transactions, then relevance and customer value increase, but processing time and computational resources increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system applies different matching strategies to different transaction types and categories. High-value or frequently purchased categories receive more comprehensive special offer matching, while lower-priority transactions use simpler matching criteria. This local quality approach ensures relevance for important transactions while reducing overall processing time.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent employs configurable matching parameters such as similarity thresholds, category weights, and offer priority levels that can be adjusted to balance relevance and processing time. By changing these parameters, the system can optimize for either higher relevance (more thorough matching) or faster processing (simpler matching) depending on operational requirements.
3Measurement precision
If merchant name variations are compared and matched, then accuracy of special offer linking improves, but complexity of matching algorithms increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system creates standardized reference copies of merchant names from the special offer database and compares transaction merchant names against these standardized versions. This copying approach allows for consistent matching across variations while keeping the comparison algorithm relatively simple, as it relies on string matching against pre-defined reference copies rather than complex pattern recognition.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent implements a universal matching framework that handles multiple types of merchant name variations (exact matches, partial matches, category-based matches, synonym matches) through a single unified algorithm. This universal approach improves accuracy across different variation types while avoiding the need for separate specialized algorithms for each variation type, thus controlling overall complexity.
Data Source
AI summary
A computer system including at least one computer-readable medium has software to provide online account statements for accounts of customers of a company. The at least one computer-readable medium includes: a transaction database comprising a transaction history for an account of a customer of the company; a merchant database comprising variations of merchant names for merchants; software to compare the merchant name of the transaction entry of the transaction history from the transaction database with the variations of merchant names from the merchant database; software to provide a hyperlinked special offer indicia if a match occurs between the merchant name from the transaction database and one of the variations of merchant names from the merchant database; and software to provide an online account statement web page to the customer via the network.