Patent ID: 8250187

Claim:
A distributed transaction system for enabling users to conduct financial transactions using services from third party service providers, the system including: a plurality of kiosks, each of the kiosks including a processing platform running an operating system and a plurality of physical system resources including: at least one or more user interfaces enabling a user to access selected ones of the services available through the kiosk to facilitate a financial transaction initiated by a user of the system; a data store for storing configuration information for distributed financial transaction services available to a user from the kiosk, wherein configuration information for each available service further includes information for interfacing with the necessary physical system resources required to enable a user to interface with a selected one of the available services, wherein the configuration information for a selected service identifies the physical resources required to conduct the financial transaction, and; a plurality of physical system resource hardware interfaces enabling the operating system to interface with the required ones of the physical system resources to execute a predetermined series of actions defined by the configuration information that enable a user access to a selected service through the required physical system resources for the selected available service; and a central processing center including a first communications interface with the kiosk whereby the central processing center can communicate independently with each of the kiosks to remotely enable or disable selected ones of the physical system resources required to access ones of the available services.