Patent ID: 8155975

Claim:
A method for coordinating the generation of a plurality of electronic transactions from settlement data associated with previously decisioned transaction data originally captured by distributed client computer systems, the method comprising the steps of: providing a hierarchical access control mechanism for defining data access relationships and inheritance of information for a plurality of interconnected nodes, each of the plurality of nodes being associated with one or more client computer systems of the distributed client computer systems; configuring the plurality of nodes by inheriting decisioning criteria using the hierarchical access control mechanism in a top down inheritance implementation, the inherited decisioning criteria for use by respective nodes of the plurality of nodes in decisioning respective node transaction data in generating respective node settlement data, such that the plurality of nodes includes a first node in a first hierarchy level, a second node in a second hierarchy level and a third node in a third hierarchy level, the second node related to the first node as a dependent node such that the second node is configured to inherit respective decisioning criteria from the first node, the third node related to the second node as a dependent node such that the third node is configured to inherit respective decisioning criteria from the second node thereby also inheriting respective decisioning criteria from the first node; and initiating a settlement process for the plurality of nodes using the data access relationship of the hierarchical access control mechanism in a bottom up implementation by: collecting at the third node all third node settlement data assigned to the third node, the third node settlement data being associated with previously decisioned node transaction data of the third node based on the respective decisioning criteria inherited by the third node; continuing the settlement process by collecting all second node settlement data assigned to the second node, the second node settlement data being associated with previously decisioned node transaction data of the second node based on the respective decisioning criteria inherited by the second node; and continuing the settlement process by collecting all the first node settlement data assigned to the first node, the first node settlement data being associated with previously decisioned node transaction data of the first node based on the respective decisioning criteria inherited by the first node; and generating the plurality of electronic transactions based on the collected settlement data including the first node settlement data, the second node settlement data and the third node settlement data and sending to at least one member system responsible for electronically processing the plurality of electronic transactions.