FR2834599A1 - ELECTRONIC PAYMENT METHOD - Google Patents

Abstract

Internet service prepayment system, characterized in that it comprises the triggering means making it possible, at the level of a server managed by a payment management operator, to trigger a telephone connection whose unit value corresponds exactly to the value of the service likely to be purchased by a consumer.

Description

in the Troupe.

  The present invention relates to a prepayment system and method which can be applied on the one hand to telephone communications and on the other hand to services rendered in particular on the Internet by providers or site managers to end users. More particularly, it allows a user of sites accessible on an electronic network

  of the Internet type to access online paid services offered by said sites.

  Its field of application more generally covers all of the

  voice, data, image or sound communications.

  It is known to bill telephone calls "on connection" or "on time". Many hardware and software solutions

  have been proposed to secure and automate this billing method.

  Billing for telephone calls is based either on the use of a line assigned to a user whose contact details are known and who is responsible for the consumption observed, or on the debit s of a prepaid card with an identification code and whose the balance is tracked

in real time by the operator.

  A substantial improvement in secure methods of payment for telephone communications is the so-called "POSA (R)" card for Point of sale Activation (and Recharge). This method, generally based on the use o of a physical support (for example a plastic card) has the advantage that the support does not increase in value, that is to say that the credit is only validated, if and only if a transaction has been carried out at the cash register, the cash register being connected to the central supervision system managed by the publisher of the prepayment means, the corresponding credit is immediately opened and the consumer can use his phone until the credit he acquired. This same method has recently been declined in a dematerialized form: in this case the buyer is given after payment at the cash desk of the point of sale a certain amount (generally of the order of 10 or 20 Euros) a code which , associated with the means of communication at its disposal (mobile or landline telephone with an intangible telephone number or linked to the code issued) opens a usage credit corresponding to the amount received. We understand that POSA type systems have the advantage, for merchants, of avoiding the risk of theft and, for consumers, of limiting telephone consumption to a sum

  perfectly known and strictly limited.

  On another level and in another field, it is also known to charge for services consumed on the Internet, for example downloading of texts, data, programs or sound files, consultation of databases or forecasts, access to consultation of press articles or paid documentation. This invoicing poses the problem of materializing and securing transactions, especially for small purchases, which do not justify the use of secure transaction procedures and supervised by banking establishments or their branches. We also note that consumers are particularly reluctant with regard to the transmission of their numbers and a fortiori their bank card codes on the network. In addition, the anonymity of the purchase (impossibility for the service provider is to identify the customer by the means of payment used) is

  often desired or even required by many users.

  The spread of the Internet, and more specifically of what is called electronic commerce, in the B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to private) sectors is notoriously hampered by the lack of solutions o technically and legally satisfactory for billing for the services available "online". It is the same for the many cultural and leisure activities offered on the Internet: if certain sites manage to finance their operation by artifices like selling advertising space, most of the stakeholders seek to be able to charge for all or part of the services rendered to people visiting their sites and using the

proposed services.

  Surveys conducted with consumers, declared or potential buyers of online services and information have shown a real expectation compared to prepaid solutions, making it possible to limit in any event and in an absolutely certain way the sum likely to be paid or taken after a transaction or a plurality of transactions. The anonymity of transactions also corresponds to a request from a large number

  of users of the services offered on the Internet.

  With regard to services and / or information likely to be provided by a plurality of service providers having no legal link between them (for example a weather service, a newspaper publisher and a gaming site) It is not possible, in the current state of fiduciary legislation, to issue a prepaid card which would make it possible to pay for the various services likely to be purchased on the Internet by a single consumer or by

  employees of the same company.

  to To overcome this difficulty, - many sites offer subscriptions and some have experimented with prepayment formulas for the services they present. These systems are relatively rigid, to the point that they are contradictory with the flexibility and user-friendliness expected by Internet users: you have to be known and referenced by the site manager, having i5 provided proof of its capacity to pay the desired service (which in some cases may represent only a few francs or less than one euro) to obtain

this service.

  Another family of solutions is represented by billing on account: the telecommunications operator serves as direct support for billing; in this case, the connection to a given service and / or the action of clicking on predefined screen areas triggers the incrementation of a virtual counter. At the end of the month, the telecommunications operator sends an invoice statement to the customer, this statement includes the service (s) consumed, and the operator retrocedes to the service provider part of the extra billing triggered by the use of the service. We understand that this operating mode has many drawbacks, both for site managers and

for consumers.

  With the systems and methods included in the state of the art, for consumers, spontaneous purchase is made particularly difficult, the fear of excessive sampling not being completely lifted and respect for anonymity does not

not always guaranteed.

  It is not desirable to simply decline the POSA system, included in the state of the art, by debiting the credit purchased by the consumer in proportion and in proportion to the consumption of the services recorded by the central system. supervision. Such a method would indeed have the drawback of requiring a real-time connection between the centralized supervision system and the various management centers of the websites to which the users choose to connect. Pricing grids would be particularly difficult to establish and update, and there would be the risk of establishing a dependence of website managers on the provider, which would amount to reproducing one of the major handicaps of the system.

  said billing for account described above.

  The present invention aims to remedy, or at least mitigate, the aforementioned drawbacks of the prior art by proposing an electronic payment method which has greater flexibility of use, a better level of security, a degree of increased confidentiality, better mobility, and also a higher overall operating cost than

  those of the solutions included in the state of the art.

  According to the invention, there is proposed a prepaid access system to paid online services on the internet, characterized in that it comprises the triggering means allowing, at the level of a server managed by a management operator payment, to initiate a telephone connection whose unit value corresponds exactly to the value of each service likely to be

purchased by a consumer.

  This object is also achieved according to the invention by an electronic payment method allowing a user of a site accessible on an electronic network to pay online for paid services offered by said site, via a management operator. payment, said user having previously acquired from said operator a communication credit accessible by means of an identification code, said operator hosting a telephone network, said method comprising the following steps: s - said site offers a payment offer for '' a service at a given price through said operator, the user being asked to give the identification code of his communication credit, - the user enters the identification code and validates the entry, s - a message is sent to the operator, indicating the site name, the price of the desired service and the user identification code, - the operator ver if the authenticity of the code and the existence of a corresponding credit, o - in the case of existing credit, a telephone call is triggered from and preferably within the operator's telephone network, communication the price of which is equal to the price of the service offered. The operator also informs the site that the debit has been made and that the service can be delivered to the user. Advantageously, the operator informs the user that his credit

  communication was debited for the amount of the service price.

  Advantageously, communications established on behalf of a site manager can be recorded by the operator and be the subject of

o partial retrocessions.

  Thus, a user in possession of a communication credit "materialized" by his identification code can have access to paid services offered by sites independent of each other by paying in compensation a telephone call whose pricing is found to correspond at the price of the paid service offered. The amount of the telephone call thus paid by the user to the payment management operator will be transferred in part to the site on which the user has consulted the paying service (s), another part will be for the payment management operator, and finally

  another part will return to the access provider via the electronic network.

  o Advantageously, the operator has several call numbers on his telephone network, each number corresponding to a different communication price. Thus, depending on the price of the paid service offered, the payment management operator will initiate a telephone call by calling a telephone number whose price for the call corresponds to the price of the paid service. One can for example imagine ten different call numbers, the first of which corresponds to a communication price of half a euro and the last of which corresponds to a communication price of five

  euros with an increment of 0.5 euros between each call number.

  According to another aspect of the invention, the telephone network is provided with a memory system capable of memorizing the communications on its network, o the prices of these communications as well as the beneficiary sites. The payment management operator is thus in possession of a true history of the communications carried out on its telephone network: this history can for example serve as a basis for calculation for the repayment of the share returning to the beneficiary site. s According to another aspect of the invention, the duration of the communication on the operator's telephone network is independent of the consultation time of the paying service. As a variant, the duration of the communication over the operator's telephone network is dependent on the consultation time of the paying service. o In other words, the invention proposes: 1) to associate with each service having agreed to offer its users this method of payment a telephone rate which will be determined contractually between the site manager and the centralized operator . This telephone rate may be based on events (existence of a connection) or on the duration of said events, so as to be

  compatible with billing by the act and / or by duration.

  2) to create a plurality of call numbers and associated dialing procedures, so that it is possible to carry out, for each consumption of a service by a user, a telephone call so whose value will correspond exactly to the part of the invoicing that it will have been previously agreed to pass on to the manager of the site having rendered the service, increased by management fees, ancillary fees, taxes and charges, costs

  centralized operator remuneration.

  3) to materialize this connection in the form of a telephone call service associated with the service rendered by means of an effective telephone link made with a server located in the same premises or at

  close to the processing center.

  4) to invoice the user, that is to say debit the said credit remaining on the material or immaterial support (prepaid card or POSA) of an amount corresponding to the value fixed for the communications established for his

  o prorated account of the use of the services.

  ) to monitor in real time, by means of the centralized server, the consumption of services carried out, while having the possibility of interrupting consumption by logging out of the user or restricting access to the sites

  as soon as the credit is exhausted.

  s 6) to use the same prepaid supports benefiting from the so-called POSA secure technology equally for the transmission of voice

  (telephones) messages (Fax, SMS) and data (Internet services).

  7) to propose to site managers using the service the implementation of software solutions allowing the monitoring of consumption or realizations by their customers (possibly anonymous for those of them who will connect according to a POSA procedure corresponding to codes validated by the central system) and the establishment of real-time accounting of the sums which will be sent to them by the centralized payment management operator, it being specified that these sums may be invoiced by the centralized operator to site managers under the heading of "established communications

for account ".

  It will be noted that the concept of prepayment which can also be called the concept of micropayment adapted to the marketing of services on the Internet described in the present invention can be based either on a POSA type support as described above. , or, more simply, on a credit opened by the only purchase of a card or an access code. The cheking process

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  of the reality of the opening of the right to credit (code transmitted corresponding to a code actually put on the market previously and not expired) by the centralized operator is indeed a necessary and sufficient condition for the security of transactions. In any event, the possibility of illicit consumption of Internet services is strictly limited to the nominal value of the card

  or open credit, most often at most equal to 10 or 20 euros.

  A subsidiary advantage of the present invention is that the holder of the right to credit (materialized by a card or by an access code and validated or not by a POSA procedure) can consult and purchase services o Internet from any computer or terminal connected to the Internet. A non-Lnit.2tif example of architecture. The electronic reading in which the method of the present invention can be implemented is shown in the

single figure attached.

  s First of all, we see that the user can initialize or reload their prepayment communication credit with the cash register or electronic payment processing of stores. The communication credit can be in the form of a material support or more simply under

  the form of a simple communication credit identification code.

  Using their PC or mobile, the user can access the Internet

  or any other network such as PSTN, Transpac, cable, ADSL or other.

  n can therefore consult sites that may offer paid services. Network sites that are affiliated or that have decided to collaborate with the payment management operator can communicate with him through his micro server which is part of the operator's information system. Thus, as soon as the micro server of the operator's information system has received from the site offering the paid service the information according to which a user wants to consult this paid service by giving the identification code of his communication credit, the Information is firstly sent to an internal database of customers and products which is part of the information system. From the operator's information system database, it is then checked at the level

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  a Posar control center if the consumer communication credit identification code is real and existing. At the same time, in the operator's telecommunications system, the information is transmitted to a remote communication auto-switch, for example of the DM S type, which will initiate a telephone communication on an internal telephone network which allows to assign at the service of the site consumed a counter value giving rise to invoicing. All of these telephone connections or communications are stored in a database. As soon as the telephone communication has been established, an SMS control center sends the information to the customer and product database of the information system. As soon as the communication has been established and at the same time that the customer identification credit identification code has been found to exist, the Posar control center can debit the customer's communication credit from the value which was agreed at the outset for the price of the paid service of the site consulted by the user. Then, a Posar server allows information to be sent to the site according to which the payment management operator has made a debit corresponding to the price of the paid service on the user's communication credit. The user of course connected to the site can then directly take the information in

  line by which his communication cred * was debited.

  zo The operation of the secure prepayment system according to the invention born these sites the establishment of a software interface on the server or in the computer system of site managers (also called service providers) offering their customers this procedure. The exchange of information between the sites of service providers and the operator is done via an interface: the API (Application Program Interface). The API is a file sent to the service provider by the operator. This file is to be implanted on the server of the

  site, by the service provider.

  The API makes it possible to fulfill several functions including, in particular, connection, request for paid access, request for re-credit, consultation of the balance and disconnection. This file contains the software allowing the exchange

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  information necessary for the operation of the service, between the server of the

  service provider and operator.

  The API connects to the operator's server. Exchanges can be encrypted with an RSA type public key system, the site having for example s the operator's public key via the configuration file of the service provider's site and the private key provided to the service provider by the operator. The private key is specific to each site and transmitted to the supplier of

  service by the operator when signing the contract.

  To facilitate and encourage the use of the prepayment procedure by end users, the invention will advantageously provide for the implementation of an Internet protocol: for example, the provision of an Inte page skeleton and thanks to to which the operator provides a frame to customize to the service provider. This frame may be in HTML language and present Internet pages, representing the different stages of access to the service (entry of the card code, waiting message, link on the pages of the operator's site.). Advantageously, this Internet protocol will include the means of informing the consumer, in real time, of the evolution of the credit available to him, said credit

  being assigned to the retaining number he communicated.

  To allow the invoicing of the services and the retrocession of the part due to the supplier, the invention provides for the integration of the information transmitted by the service supplier to the operator: the operator implements in his system the information given by the supplier of service, and in particular the data relating to the pricing grids of the services offered

to end users.

  : 5 The repayment of sums due by the operator to the service provider may be facilitated by the provision of a report (or "reporting"), a procedure by which the operator periodically (for example monthly) provision of the service provider a report of the past period, sent according to a contractual frequency. This reporting is a detailed assessment of the consumption of prepaid telephone cards carried out exclusively for the paid services of the service provider,

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  by type of paid service and by date. It enables activity to be monitored and serves as the contractual basis for calculating the retrocessions owed by the operator to the service provider. Incidentally, in order to respond effectively to requests for technical information, the operator may make available to each service provider, telephone assistance and / or means of

software maintenance.

  Once the means described above are put in place, an end user can buy a prepaid card at a point of sale, which gives him o a reDendant number This same consumer can use the retering number which was provided to him during of the purchase of said card to telephone from a public or private station in which case, in a known manner, the credit which was initially associated with this precise number is debited as and when telephone communications, including pricing according to duration and distances are known. Thanks to the invention, the end user can, by means of this same card and more particularly of the referring number which he has purchased, when he is connected to the Internet by any appropriate means (computer stations fi = es or mobiles connected by wired or non-wired modems) and that it reaches a site having concluded with the operator agreements such as o described above, site which will propose to him by screens or bands adapted the methods of payment object of the invention, choose to use these payment methods. In this case, it simply communicates the reference number that it happens to have, and this information is transmitted, thanks to the API interface,

  is equipped with the site to which the consumer is connected, to the operator's server.

  This server verifies that the service is properly referenced (and incidentally up to date with its contractual obligations towards the operator) and that the reliant number transmitted corresponds to a validly issued and credited card (i.e. having been activated during a checkout or at a payment terminal). Since the operator's server is aware of the pricing conditions offered by the site in question, telephone calls can be made which may be in a vacuum, ie strictly limited to

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  computer and telephone installations app attached to the operator and to which it has been previously assigned a value corresponding to the services provided by the website to the consumer. It is the correspondence of the values between the services provided and the calls made by the operator's server which allows billing for services on a fee-for-service basis and / or for the duration in a transparent manner and without risk of error or contestation. Indeed, the communications established on behalf of each site or service provider using the operator's services and referenced by him will be stored, by means known in the telecommunications industry, which will periodically retrocede the part contractually returning to the site or to the supplier of

services concerned.

Claims (12)

claims   1.- Internet service prepayment system, characterized in that it comprises the triggering means allowing, at the level of a server managed by a payment management operator, to trigger a telephone connection whose unit value corresponds exactly to the value of   service likely to be purchased by a consumer.   2.- prepayment system according to claim 1, characterized in that the prepayment medium is a POSA type card, that is to say a card which acquires market value only after it goes to the cash register or in a payment terminal, the so-called checkout or terminal   coinciding with the assignment of a ReDentent number by the main operator.   3.- prepayment system according to claim 1, characterized in that it comprises a procedure for referencing user sites of the service by the main operator, said procedure comprising at least the establishment of a communication interface provided by the main operator and installed on the IT system of the service provider. 4.- prepayment system according to claim 3, characterized in that the procedure for re-referencing sites using the service by o the main operator also includes the communication of an Internet protocol making it possible to inform consumers of the methods of   proposed payment, as well as pricing.   5.- prepayment system according to claim 4, characterized in that the Internet protocol comprises the means of informing in real time the   consumer of the evolution of the credit he has.   6.- prepayment system according to claim 1, characterized in that it comprises a periodic reporting procedure, procedure by which the operator informs each service provider of the amount of the values represented by the telephone connections made on his behalf, said reporting procedure used as a basis for establishing invoices relating to retrocessions from the main operator to each service provider.   7.- Prepayment system according to any one of   previous claims, in which the operator has several   types of telephone connection chosen and triggered according to the value of the service purchased.   8.- Prepayment system according to any one of   previous claims, applicable to communications regulations   telephone. o 9.- Electronic prepayment method allowing a user of a site accessible on an electronic network to pay online for paid services offered by said site, through a payment management operator, said user having previously acquired from of said operator a communication credit accessible by means of an identification code, said operator hosting a telephone network, said method being characterized in that it comprises at least the following steps :, - said site offers a payment offer for '' a service at a given price through said operator, the user being asked to give the identification code of his communication credit, - the user enters his identification code and validates the entry, - a message is sent to the operator, indicating the name of the service, the price of the desired service and the user identification code, - the operator checks the aut henticity of the code and the existence of a corresponding credit, - in case of existing credit, a telephone call is triggered on the operator's telephone network, communication whose price is equal to the price of the service offered by the site, - the site is informed that the debit has been made and that the service can be delivered to the user.   10.- Method according to claim 9, wherein the operator informs the user that his communication credit has been debited from amount of the service price.   11.- Method according to claim 9 or 10, wherein the communications are established on behalf of a site manager are   recognized by the operator and are subject to partial retrocessions.   12.- Method according to claim 9, 10 or 11, wherein the operator has several call numbers on his telephone network, each number corresponding to a different communication price o.   13.- Method according to any one of claims 9 to 12, in   which the duration of the communication on the telephone network of   the operator is independent of the consultation time of the paying service.   14.- Method according to any one of claims 9 to 12, in   which the duration of the communication on the telephone network of   the operator is dependent on the consultation time of the paying service.