Abstract: A method and system for reserving future purchases of goods or services. Plural electronic options include electronic option terms established by one or more suppliers who can supply the goods or services. The option terms vary greatly among the individual suppliers and no two suppliers may use the same option terms. Use of variable option terms provides significant flexibility for use of the electronic options by suppliers. The method and system may also allow a purchaser to risk a small amount of money to use an electronic option to reserve a price to purchase or not purchase desired goods or services that may or may not ever exist at a desired future time.

Abstract: A method and system are presented for making temporary changes to business logic implemented in a software program. In the preferred embodiment, business logic is stored in rules that are associated together in a series of tests. Changes to the business logic are stored in overrides, which contain one or more instructions for altering the rules. These instructions can either add or delete a business rule, or can create a new test that contains multiple business rules. The overrides themselves are grouped together into negotiations. Since the changes to the rule set are stored in overrides, no changes are made to the base rule set. Thus, updates to the base rule set are immediately effective in implementations using one or more overrides. When an evaluation is conducted in situations requiring a variation from the standard business process, the base rule set is still utilized as a starting point.

Abstract: A method for providing a person with a secure retirement program employs a computerized system to allocate assets owned by a person towards purchase of retirement benefits. The system selects at least one desired retirement benefit from a group of available retirement benefits. A user may specify a conversion period for allocating the assets to the selected benefits during this conversion period. The system allocates portions of the assets towards purchasing a fraction of the selected benefits at selected intervals within the conversion period. Thereafter, the system calculates benefit payments corresponding to the selected retirement benefits to the person during and after the conversion period, wherein the benefit payments during the conversion period are from contributions made from the assets and the purchased benefits, and the benefit payments after the conversion period are provided by the purchased benefits.

Abstract: A system and method utilizes intelligent agents for searching, analyzing, and reporting business, financial, or non-financial information available through communication networks, particularly the Internet, regardless of inconsistencies in formats and granularity of that information. This information may then be used by users for financial and non-financial information for business decisions, developing risk profiles and credit worthiness. The intelligent agent may search Internet resources for business information of companies upon a user's request. The intelligent agent parses the retrieved information consisted with series of texts and identifies tables containing various financial statements. Each extracted table may be parsed into line items and every line item may be identified by matching to the appropriate XBRL taxonomy. Finally, the intelligent agent tags the information using XBRL taxonomy and generates financial statements in XBRL.

Abstract: In various embodiments, test trading orders are generated, transmitted and ranked.

Abstract: A method of funding and managing a fund of diverse life insurance policies issued by investment grade carriers, the fund providing enhanced risk adjusted investment return. The method includes selecting, using computer enabled instructions, the life insurance policies for the fund without underwriting on the lives of the insured of each life insurance policy, the step of selecting based on a cash value analysis of the life insurance policies to identify those policies with viable projected cash value streams and that can be positively impacted to improve the cash value streams; acquiring, using computer enabled instructions, the selected life insurance policies for the fund, wherein benefits of life insurance policy ownership pass to the owners of the fund; and managing the fund, using computer enabled instructions, to maximize a financial risk adjusted investment rate of return that provides equity level returns with fixed income asset exposure.

Abstract: The invention comprises A comprises a system and method for hedging or mitigating mortality exposure risk in a portfolio of mortality-dependent instruments. A mortality risk or longevity risk of the portfolio is calculated or otherwise determined. Then the sensitivity of the portfolio to mortality risk or longevity risk is calculated or otherwise determined, in other words, how much is cost or value of the portfolio affected by a change in mortality rate. To account for that mortality exposure, a selection is made of building block mortality derivatives that include age-based mortality derivatives. The selected plurality of selected plurality of building block mortality derivatives are used to create a hedge against the mortality risk or longevity risk of the portfolio.

Abstract: Managing and evaluating commodities pricing, in one embodiment, includes retrieving and summing one or more price data sets exchanged between a buyer and seller agent in a specified time period. Additionally, metric data indicative of market prices for commodities indicated by the retrieved price data sets are summed. The summed totals are then compared to generate a comparison value. In another embodiment, one or more price data sets in a specified time period are retrieved, wherein commodities indicated by the price data sets meet a specified criterion. The retrieved price data sets and metric data indicative of market prices for the indicated commodities are summed and compared. In another embodiment, price data in one or more requests for quote are compared with metric data to normalize quoted prices. Accordingly, multi-value cross compilation of sales transactions and metric data for evaluation of commodities pricing is achieved.

Abstract: The present invention relates to a method that allows managers of retail portfolios to compute performance time series that have been cleaned of marketing impacts, lifecycles, management actions, and seasonality, leaving only the performance changes due to the environment. These normalized series can be used to compute the necessary covariance matrices for portfolio optimization or computing portfolio-level economic capital. The invention applies to any retail product or segment where vintage-level performance time series are being stored.

Abstract: A receivables transaction management platform is configured for facilitating management of international trade receivables transactions. The platform includes a task manager layer and a platform functionality layer. The task manager layer is configured for facilitating management of transaction information workflow tasks and export receivables tasks. The platform functionality layer is accessible by at least a portion of the managers and is configured for enabling facilitation of the transaction information workflow tasks and the export receivables tasks. Managing the transaction information workflow tasks and export receivables tasks includes facilitating preparation of a document and data portfolio required for settlement of an international trade receivables transaction, facilitating electronic submission of the document and data portfolio to a designated recipient and facilitating acceptance of the document and data portfolio.

Abstract: A technique to provide a return from an aggregate of an investment in a cash equivalent account and a leveraged index product account over a time period that is substantially equivalent to a multiple of the return of a theoretical position in an underlying index for the period of time is provided by calculating in a computer system a benchmark exposure of the theoretical position in the underlying index corresponding to the index used in the leveraged index fund; and based on the benchmark exposure, determining whether to initiate a transaction to re-allocate funds from the leveraged index product to a cash equivalent account or from the cash equivalent account to the leveraged index product according to the determined daily benchmark exposure.

Abstract: Methods and systems are provided for assessing the potential for fraud of an insurance claim. In some embodiments, request data may be provided to a computer system. In some embodiments, at least one fraud potential indicator may be assessed to the request data from at least one comparison of at least one request data element to at least one fraud model. In some embodiments, a fraud potential indicator may be an estimate of the potential for fraud in an insurance claim. In some embodiments, at least one fraud potential indicator for request data may be assessed based on at least one comparison of at least one request data element to additional insurance data. Some embodiments may include assessing at least one fraud potential indicator for request data based on at least one fraud potential indicator.

Abstract: A method facilitating secure financial transactions using email is presented comprising the steps of receiving bill data at a server implementing the method, and generating an email message to a recipient with information including at least a portion of the received bill data. The amount of bill data included in the email message is based, at least in part, on the email address of the recipient.

Abstract: An insurance policy funds end-of-lifetime activities for a non-human facility at an end of a lifetime of the facility with a policy benefit whose amount is based upon growth of a premium.

Abstract: A method for the online modification, submission and approval processing of a future payment request to afford a user the ability to renegotiate established loan agreement debt terms in which network communications are established between a user, such as a debtor, and a server is presented. The method comprises receiving information, at the server, regarding the loan agreement debt terms, presenting received information to a debtor, providing an interactive environment enabling a debtor to modify existing terms, submitting modified terms, processing data from the available information using a rules based engine, and processing a future payment request based on at least one decision made by the rules based engine. While online, the user/debtor may engage in revising a rejected future payment request in an attempt to reach a satisfactory renegotiation of debt terms.

Abstract: A method and system for automating the decision-making process used in underwriting of insurance applications is described. While this approach is demonstrated for insurance underwriting, it is broadly applicable to diverse decision-making applications in business, commercial, and manufacturing processes. A structured methodology is used based on a multi-model parallel network of multivariate adaptive regression splines (“MARS”) models to identify the relevant set of variables and their parameters, and build a framework capable of providing automated decisions. The parameters of the MARS-based decision system are estimated from a database consisting of a set of applications with reference decisions against each. Cross-validation and development/hold-out combined with re-sampling techniques are used to build a robust set of models that minimize the error between the automated system's decision and the expert human underwriter.

Abstract: In accordance with one aspect of the present invention, a method is disclosed for valuing at least one bond having a nominal lifetime, the bond having estate put and call options and a cash flow value. The method includes the steps of decomposing the bond into a plurality of pieces, the plurality of pieces equal to the number of years of the nominal lifetime of the bond, valuing the estate put, call option, and cash flow of each piece based on an expected mortality rate, and aggregating the estate put, call option, and cash flow values of each piece to determine an aggregate value, wherein the value of the bond is equivalent to the aggregate value. A system also is disclosed for implementing the steps of the method of the present invention to determine the value of the bond.

Abstract: Methods and systems are provided for generating a sale offer over an electronic network (e.g., the Internet). Such methods and systems may be used to increase the revenue of a website by offering, at a substantially discounted or virtually free basis, one or more goods and/or services to visitors of the website. In one implementation, the seller may transmit a sale offer on the website for a high quality good or service, wherein the good or service can be purchased for free or at a cost near zero. The seller may make the offer visible and available to prospective buyers, who are connected to the website at that moment. Additionally, the sale offer may be available for only a very limited amount of time and may be offered at random or unpredictable times on the website in order to increase traffic to the website.

Abstract: The present invention is directed, in various embodiments, to a computer system comprising a party database and a products-role database. The party database contains party data records that contain information about various parties, respectively. The products-role database contains a number of product-role records. Each of the product-role records is associated with a different financial product. Further, each of the product-role records contains a unique party identifier for each party that performs a role for the corresponding financial product (such as issuer, guarantor, custodian, etc.) and a corresponding link to a party data record in the party database for each party, The party identifier is used consistently throughout the records of the products-role database to identify the corresponding party for all products where the party performs a role.

Abstract: A message prioritization process includes an interface process for receiving a primary attributable security interest message and one or more secondary attributable security interest messages placed by the market participant on a securities trading system. The primary attributable security interest message relates to a defined quantity of an individual security traded on the securities trading system. Each secondary attributable security interest message increments the defined quantity of the primary attributable security interest message by an incremental quantity. A code assignment process assigns a superior prioritization code to the primary attributable security interest message and an inferior prioritization code to each secondary attributable security interest message. These prioritization codes control the order in which the attributable security interest messages are processed by a matching process, and the inferior prioritization code is subordinate to the superior prioritization code.