The present invention relates generally to a system for accessing data related to financial transactions. Particularly, users of the Internet or an online information service such as CompuServe® may access data related to their own financial transactions that were posted as recently as the previous day.
Financial information is typically reported to financial service customers in monthly or quarterly written statements. For example, credit card companies send monthly statements that list all transactions and an outstanding balance for the reporting period. Banks and brokerages may also use written statements to report activity. Whether the statements are monthly or quarterly, by the time they reach the customer, they rarely reflect the current state of the account. Several days or weeks may pass between the time the reporting period ends and the statement is received because time is needed to process, print, and send the statements. As a practical matter, financial institutions need to establish a cut off date for reporting account activity.
Although account activity reporting cycles are rather lengthy (e.g., quarterly or monthly), customers may be interested in weekly or daily activity reports. Consequently, customers have a need to obtain recent financial information that would not otherwise be available for weeks or months. Customers also have a need to access the recent financial information at their own convenience—preferably from anywhere and at any time. Following access to the financial information, customers may have a need to communicate with the financial services provider. For example, a customer may have a question about a transaction or following review of the transactions, a customer may wish to submit a payment electronically. Finally, customers need to see the financial data presented in an organized and understandable format.
The present invention (ConductorSM) is a suite of online financial services. Supported functions include credit card account lookup and reporting, and checking and bill paying. In addition, customers and financial services providers may communicate with each other. For example, Conductor allows customers to view and use financial information concerning recent activity in various accounts. Specifically, financial data relating to credit and debit card transactions are available through the Internet or an online information service the day after the transactions are posted. The ability to provide such recent credit and debit card transaction data to users of the Internet or an online information service is unique to the present invention.
The present invention is a sophisticated computerized system of financial services based on the TCP/IP protocol suite. Consequently, the services are available through the Internet. Alternatively, the same services may be made available directly through an online information service such as CompuServe®. In the preferred embodiment, the invention is described in relation to its accessibility through the Internet. Conductor is implemented as a distributed “information cluster” located on the global Internet so it may be accessed from a variety of presentation tools. An example of the type of information available from Conductor is financial data relating to credit and debit card transactions processed daily by a financial services provider. The financial data are transmitted daily to Conductor so that users of the Internet or an online information service may access financial data relating to their own credit and debit card transactions. The financial data may also be transmitted for further processing to an accounting, word-processing, or spreadsheet software package running on the users computer.
The system of the present invention has several advantages over known financial information access methods. Conductor may be accessed at any time from around the world because it is part of the global Internet. In an alternative embodiment, Conductor may be accessed directly through an online information service such as CompuServe®. With either embodiment, it may be accessed using any one of a number of presentation tools. Because of its ties to financial services providers, Conductor allows credit or debit cardholders to review account activity regarding postings that occurred as recently as the previous day. Cardholders use familiar access methods to view and download the financial data. Finally, the present invention allows the financial data to be organized for direct transmission to popular accounting, word-processing, and spreadsheet programs. Due to the sophistication of the process used for converting and downloading data to the other programs, data may be downloaded as frequently as the user desires. These advantages and others are explained further by the accompanying drawings and detailed description.