Patent NZ-724512-A (NZ)
Title: A method, performed in a payment network, for requesting a transfer of data in a payment processing system
Inventor: JUDGE EDWARD W
IPC: G07B15/04
Filed: 2015-03-02
Abstract: The transport systems of many large cities, including London, Paris and Singapore, require users to have a proprietary transit card in order to pay for their journey. It would be a lot more convenient for users of a transport system to not be required to own such transit cards. The transport systems of some transit agencies are therefore being adapted to accept standard bank issued cards, with the payment for a user’s journey made as an online transaction. A problem experienced when allowing users to use a bank card to validly enter and exit a transport system is that the time required to perform an on-line transaction with the user’s bank card is longer than an acceptable length of time for delaying a user on entry and exit of the transport system. In order for the journey to be paid for, the transaction is made by the acquirer of the transport system sending a request for payment to the issuer of the bank card of the user. The request is sent either when the user is travelling on the transport system or when the user has already exited the transport system. If the payment request is denied by the issuer, the user is in debt to the transit agency that provides the transport system as they have already consumed travel services. In order ensure that the debt is recovered, the transport system typically adds the details of the bank card of the user to the transport system’s status list of cards. The user is therefore prevented from travelling on the transport system until the outstanding balance has been settled. In order to solve the above problems, automatic debt recovery may be performed. To perform automatic debt recovery, the transport system automatically sends one or more further requests for payment to the issuer of the card (via their acquirer). If one of these requests is approved by the issuer, and payment is therefore made, the transit agency will typically automatically remove the card details of the user from the status list. A user may therefore be both added and removed from the status list without the user manually performing a task, or the user even knowing that their card was entered on the status list. However, a problem experienced by the known automatic debt recovery techniques is that whether or not it will work is highly speculative. The number of allowed requests the technique is typically limited and the acquirer can only guess a time for transmitting each request with no way of knowing whether the request is likely to work. Moreover, automatic debt recovery requests typically may not start until 4 days after a declined authorisation of a transaction and a user may well attempt to travel on the transport system before an automatic debt recovery request has been sent. As a solution to one or more of these problems, the present invention provides a computer-implemented method for requesting a transfer of data, the method comprising: transmitting a first request for a transfer of data in response to the use of a user device; determining that the first request for the transfer of data has been declined; detecting an event that indicates that the transfer of data in response to the use of the user device can be accepted; and transmitting a second request for the transfer of data in dependence on detecting that the event has occurred. [Fig 2]