Patent ID: 7127606

Claim:
A method of making a financial payment by a first party to a second party on an account of the first party maintained by a third party, information pertaining to the account of the first party being retrievable from a database of the third party based on a unique identifier for that account, the method comprising the steps of: (a) associating by the third party a public key of a public-private key pair with the unique account identifier; (b) digitally signing by the first party a message including an instruction to make payment to the second party on the account of the first party, the digital signature being generated with a public key of the public-private key pair; (c) communicating by the first party the message and digital signature in a first electronic communication to the second party; (d) communicating by the second party the message and digital signature in a second electronic communication to the third party; and (e) upon receipt of the second electronic communication from the second party, performing by the third party entity authentication with respect to the first party, the entity authentication consisting of solely conducting message authentication using only said generated digital signature and the public key associated with the unique account identifier of the first party.