Abstract: An electronic financial system for providing financial services over the Internet has multiple billers, a service center, multiple financial institutions. The service center is responsible for distributing electronic bills on behalf of billers. The service center has a Web site that customers can directly access to examine their bills. The financial institutions also offer their own Web sites for their customers. Each financial institution's Web site presents a home page that allows its customers to select different services, such as examining a checking or savings account balance, or conducting a funds transfer. These services are supported locally at the financial institution's Web site. The home page also offers an option to view personal billing statements from the billers, which are stored at the service center.

Abstract: An electronic billing system provides a set of tools for a biller to create and design a customized billing statement. The system includes a statement designer that enables the biller to create a template for the billing statement. Once the statement is designed, the biller provides the statement format and billing data to a third party billing service center, which generates the electronic billing statements in the biller-designed format and electronically distributes the billing statements to consumers. To assist the biller in creating statement templates, the biller integration system maintains industry schema tables that are tailored to particular industries. The tables provide a default set of predefined billing categories for a given industry that the biller might wish to use in its template. The biller integration system and service center are each equipped with a gateway to facilitate the exchange of the statement template and billing data.

Abstract: A system and method for conducting commerce over a distributed network manage merchant and product information in an electronic shopping basket, payment source information in an electronic wallet, and shipping address information in an electronic address book, all of such information being stored on a consumer computer. A commerce client running on the consumer computer is configured as a MIME handler and extends the functionality of a standard Web browser to support computer-based shopping. A merchant site Web server provides HTML-coded Web documents which describe merchant products and which host computer-based shopping options. The HTML-coded Web documents contain function-calling information by which consumer-selected options invoke shopping-related functions on either the merchant (server) computer or the consumer (client) computer.