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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