Abstract: Segregated employer group settlement accounts (101, 102, . . . , 10N) receive payments for medical insurance claims and an explanation of benefits (EOB) memory (14) receives an explanation of the medical services of multiple medical service providers against which parts of the payment are to be applied and explanations of amounts due by individual patients. An electronic sorting and transfer processor (16) in accordance with the explanations of benefits, electronically transfers funds from each of the employer group settlement accounts into each of a plurality of medical service provider settlement accounts (261, 262, . . . 26M) without co-mingling funds. The funds from the service provider settlement accounts are transferred (30) to each medical service provider's banking institution (32) concurrently with an electronic transfer of the corresponding EOBs to the medical service provider's accounting system (34).

Abstract: Credit card blanks are manufactured with a plurality of random, secure codes (24) such as randomly applied infrared readable bits. A card encoding apparatus (B) includes a secure code reader (32) for reading the secure code from one of the blanks. The secure code and account information are operated on by an encoding algorithm (36, 38) to generate a verification code which is electromagnetically recorded (40) or embossed (42) on the card. In conjunction with a credit card transaction, the merchant passes the credit card past an electromagnetic read head (50) and an infrared read head (52) to read the electronically encoded account information, verification code, and secure code. A keyboard (54) enables the merchant to manually enter this data if the electromagnetic recording should be unreadable. The verification apparatus operates on the account information with a verification algorithm (66, 68, 70) to generate an answer corresponding to the verification code.

Abstract: A credit card (10) has a layer (28) of high coercivity magnetic material which is of a sufficiently high magnetic coercivity that once its dipoles are polarized, they are unable to be returned to a randomized distribution. The card is embossed with a man-readable code (30) and is electromagnetically recorded with a man-nonreadable code. Particularly, the electromagnetically recorded code includes an account code (42, 44), a visual comparison algorithm code (50), a visual comparison code (52), an electronic comparison code (54), a card identification number (56), and a personal identification number (58). A reader (60) reads the account code and produces a man-readable display (102) of the electromagnetically coded account number. To verify that he has compared the display with the account number on a receipt, the merchant marks the symbols on the receipt which correspond to the highlighted symbols of the display.