Monitoring The Viewing of Supplemental Information Accompanying Electronic Billing Transactions

Abstract

Systems and methods for monitoring the viewing of supplemental information associated with an electronic billing transaction where both bill information associated with a bill and forced-to-view information is transmitted ultimately to a payor. The forced-to-view information is associated with supplemental information that must be viewed by the payor before a payor can pay the bill through a service provider. When the forced to view information is selected, a request for the supplemental information is received, and the supplemental information is transmitted in response to the request. An indicator is stored in association with the payor that the payor has viewed the supplemental information. A message is created that the supplemental information has been accessed by the payor, and the message is transmitted to the service provider enabling acceptance of payment of the bill.

Description

RELATED APPLICATIONS [0001] This application is a Continuation of pending application Ser. No. 09 / 798,895, entitled “Electronic Billing with Required Viewing of Supplemental Information,” filed Mar. 6, 2001, which is a Continuation-In-Part of pending application Ser. No. 09 / 414,731, entitled “Electronic Billing With Flexible Biller Controlled Electronic Bill Presentment”, filed Oct. 8, 1999, which is related to application Ser. No. 09 / 017,169, entitled “Distributed Data Accessing Technique”, filed Feb. 2, 1998, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,055,567. All of the above-referenced applications are hereby incorporated by reference.FIELD OF THE INVENTION [0002] The present invention relates to electronic bill presentment and more particularly to electronic billing with biller controlled electronic bill and supplemental information presentment. BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0003] There are two prevalent models for electronic bill presentment that are currently used in industry. The first is an aggreg...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0018] The first information is supplemental information. Supplemental information, in this aspect, is information other than billing information. This could include any of, but is not limited to, special announcements, promotional offers, regulatory notices, and notices associated with the network user's account. Supplemental information is information the biller wishes the network user to view before viewing bill detail information. Thus, this first embodiment of the present invention allows a biller to force a network user to view supplemental information before viewing bill detail information.

[0041] It will be understood by those skilled in the art that each of the first, second, and third embodiments are easily implemented using computer software. More particularly, software can be easily programmed, using routine programming skill, based upon the description of the invention set forth herein and stored on a storage medium which is readable by a computer processor to cause the processor to operate such that the method of the respective embodiment is performed as described herein.

Problems solved by technology

However, as only the first information identifier has been transmitted to the network user, the network user can only access the first information.

Images