Abstract: A consumer may make an electronic bill payment from his financial institution account to an intermediary for a certain amount. Data related to the bill payment transaction may be sent to a facilitation server associated with the intermediary. This data may be filtered to determine whether or not the data represents a valid bill payment transaction. If it does, an intermediate account provided by the intermediary, or an account of a third party (such as an on-line merchant) may be immediately credited with the amount of the bill payment so that the consumer can immediately use those funds in an on-line purchase.

Abstract: A consumer may make an electronic bill payment from his financial institution account to an intermediary for a certain amount. Data related to the bill payment transaction may be sent to a facilitation server associated with the intermediary. This data may be filtered to determine whether or not the data represents a valid bill payment transaction. If it does, an intermediate account provided by the intermediary, or an account of a third party (such as an on-line merchant) may be immediately credited with the amount of the bill payment so that the consumer can immediately use those funds in an on-line purchase.

Abstract: Secure transactions are achieved over a public network by using a private network to handle the sensitive information of the transaction. When a client requests a product from a vendor server over a public network, the vendor server notifies a facilitation server on the public network. This results in the client receiving a set of computer readable instructions from the facilitation server. The set of instructions provide access instructions to a transaction server system on the private network so that sensitive transaction information is sent to the transaction server system on the private network rather than over the public Internet. Where the sensitive information is credit card information, the transaction server system may obtain authorisation for the transaction from a financial institution and then notify the vendor accordingly.