Patent ID: 8195568

Claim:
A method of protecting from theft and misuse bankcard data from merchant computer systems and securely selecting any one of a plurality of bankcards of a customer at a merchant point of sale interface for a payment transaction to a merchant comprising the steps of: a. enabling selecting a debit card transaction requiring entry of a PIN in a merchant point of sale (POS) interface, enabling entering of (i) a customer identifier, without customer identity data, where the original bankcard data has been transformed into an equivalent bankcard data that is indistinguishable in format from the original bankcard data, by a payment card that encodes the customer identifier and (ii) a bankcard specific personal identification number (CPIN) in the merchant point of sale (POS) interface; b. enabling sending the customer identifier and the CPIN to an adapted prior art merchant gateway, along with the payment transaction data that includes a merchant identifier and a payment amount; c. separating by the adapted prior art merchant gateway the use of the payment card from other bankcards and interfacing by the adapted prior art merchant gateway with a payment card system, and sending to the payment card system the customer identifier and the CPIN; d. having stored customer bankcard data in a database in the payment card system, wherein, each bankcard is identified with a separate CPIN, identifying a particular bankcard data of the customer from the database and verifying the customer by the bankcard specific CPIN in the payment card system; e. returning to the adapted prior art merchant gateway the bankcard data corresponding to the customer identifier and the CPIN from the payment card system; f. assembling by the adapted prior art merchant gateway, a payment transaction record to include the bankcard data from the payment card system and the payment transaction data, and by submitting the payment transaction record to a bankcard authorization network, the method protecting from theft and misuse bankcard data from merchant computer systems.