Patent ID: 7827108

Claim:
A payment service system for making electronic payments from a payment service account associated with a user, the payment service account being funded by financial transactions transferring money to the payment service account from a user account maintained at a financial institution, the payment service system comprising: a communication device; a memory; a processor coupled to the memory and communication device; and an account validation module executable by the processor and adapted to: store in the memory user account information received from a user, generate a verification identifier associated with the user account maintained at the financial institution, provide a first copy the verification identifier to the user, store a second copy of the verification identifier in the memory, receive, from the financial institution, a user initiated financial transaction involving the user account at the financial institution through the communication device, the received financial transaction including the first copy of the verification identifier, wherein the first copy of the verification identifier is supplied to the financial institution by the user for inclusion in the user initiated financial transaction, determine whether the first copy of the verification identifier contained in the received user initiated financial transaction corresponds to the second copy of the verification identifier stored in the memory, based on a successful determination that the received first copy of the verification identifier corresponds with the stored second copy of the verification identifier, store verification information in the memory to indicate that the relationship between the user and the user account has been successfully validated; the account validation module further adapted to complete one or more subsequent user initiated financial transactions involving the user account at the financial institution based on the stored verification information without further validating the relationship between the user and the user account maintained at the financial institution.