Fun with numbers: Payment Switches

[rah@shipwright.com (Robert Hettinga)]

Saw this on buyinfo. At first blush it reminds me of the old CMU "Billing
Server" without the gopher...

>From: treese@OpenMarket.com
>To: www-buyinfo@allegra.att.com
>Subject: technical paper: Payment Switches for Open Networks
>Date: Mon, 13 Feb 1995 13:24:48 -0500
>Original-From: Win Treese <treese@OpenMarket.com>
>
>
>"Payment Switches for Open Networks" by David K. Gifford, Lawrence
>C. Stewart, Andrew C. Payne, and G. Winfield Treese is a technical
>paper describing Open Market's Internet payment switch.  It will be
>presented at IEEE COMPCON '95 (San Francisco, March 5-9). A preprint
>is available from http://www.openmarket.com/about/technical/.
>
>Here is the abstract from the paper:
>
>    We describe the first operational Internet payment switch that
>    provides real-time authorization suitable for direct use by merchant
>    servers.  A payment switch is a server that creates digital
>    representations of conventional financial instruments, and forwards
>    authentic payment orders on these instruments to their corresponding
>    conventional financial networks and institutions.  Our payment switch
>    provides support for time-based and item-based pricing, implements
>    switch based authorization and settlement aggregation for
>    micro-payments, and includes an extensive customer support system in
>    order to provide a high level of customer confidence in electronic
>    commerce.  Fraud control is based on a transaction-specific
>    multi-level security model that accommodates existing Internet
>    browsers.  Multiple authentication technologies are applied to every
>    transaction.
>
>More information about COMPCON '95 can be found at
> http://www.hal.com:80/compcon/
>
>Win Treese
>Open Market, Inc.
>treese@OpenMarket.com
>

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