Abstract: An e-commerce payment solution that enables individuals and low-volume merchants to conduct e-commerce with established electronic payment vehicles, such as credit cards, without resort to permanent payment processing accounts is disclosed. Providing accounts for such small merchants with merchant-hosting entities that in turn are set up and in communication with a payment gateway entity that controls the processing, in concert with the novel payment processing and settlement architecture disclosed, permits many small merchants to effectively conduct online credit or debit transactions on a per transaction basis with little or no set-up costs.

Abstract: The present invention, is an online paperless account approval and provisioning technique and system. Specifically, the invention discloses a method and system for automatically approving an electronic account application (such as a merchant account) of an applicant to establish a valid account and provisioning the account with electronically integrated data systems in order to enable the applicant to provide a service. The method includes capturing account information via an online account application submitted by the applicant; automatically processing the account information using predetermined acceptance criteria; upon acceptance of the predetermined criteria, automatically approving the account; and automatically provisioning the approved account with the integrated data systems using the account information.