Patent ID: 7775426

Claim:
A system for facilitating electronic funds transactions using interoperable payment cards between one or more cardholders and one or more merchants, the system comprising: one or more payment cards containing point-of-sale readable account information, configured to be issued to the one or more cardholders within a merchant-issued card program; wherein said one or more payment cards are associated with one or more respective account numbers that begin with unique International Standards Organization (ISO) identification number, which are assigned for the merchant-issued card program; wherein said one or more payment cards are configured to be issued by the one or more merchants, participating in said merchant-issued card program as one or more issuing merchants, to the one or more cardholders with privileges to execute purchase transactions interoperably at any of the one or more merchants; one or more point-of-sale transaction terminals respectively associated with at least some of said one or more merchants, acting as acquiring merchants, and configured to interoperably receive said payment card as a form of payment, without interconnecting their respective proprietary transaction execution systems; a network-enabled computer having an associated payment card data base within the merchant-issued card program and adapted for communicating through non-proprietary card processing services with the one or more point-of-sale transaction terminals; wherein said payment card data base is configured to be loaded with information for accessing one or more respective valid demand deposit accounts (DDAs) associated with the account numbers before said one or more payment cards will be accepted for payment at the one or more point-of-sale transaction terminals; and programming associated with said computer, wherein said programming configures the computer to: receive respective transaction information from the one or more point-of-sale transaction terminals in response to an attempted purchase transactions by said one or more cardholders using said respective payment cards, execute one or more of said purchase transactions utilizing an automated clearing house (ACH) network in response to respective DDA information retained for said payment cards, in response to determining that the payment cards and purchase transactions are valid, settle one or more of the purchase transactions after execution of said one or more purchase transactions, through a card processing service, from funds retained within one or more DDAs associated with one or more of the respective payment cards associated with the one or more purchase transactions, charge one or more acquiring merchants a fee for executing said one or more purchase transactions, and provide incentives to the one or more issuing merchants who issued the one or more payment cards involved in respective purchase transactions in response to settling the respective purchase transactions.