courtesy of Andy Beal news of a patent issued to Yahoo for Payment processing.

Yahoo to Offer Payment Processing

Gary Price sends word that Yahoo has been awarded a patent for what looks like a PayPal and Google Payments competitor.

Details from Gary Price

Yahoo
Awarded Patent: Systems and methods for implementing person-to-person money exchange
First Filed: December 4, 2000
Very interesting. Will Yahoo make use of this patent? More competition for PayPal? We also know that Google has payment system plans. We posted that they registered the Google Payment Corporation a year ago last week. Since then lots of speculation.
From the Yahoo abstract, “Systems and methods for effecting online financial transactions between individuals or between individuals and entities such as banks, merchants and other companies. Each user accesses a fund exchange server to establish an online account, which is used to transfer funds to and from other entities’ online accounts. To fund an online account, funds can be transferred to the online account from a credit card account or from another online account. To withdraw funds, money can be transferred to a credit card account or other bank account. Any user may initiate a send money transaction or a request payment transaction with any other entity provided that entity has an e-mail address.” On a somewhat related note: Last September, Rebecca Jarvis at Business 2.0 wrote an article about a P2P money exchange company (lending/borrowing) named Zopa. Their is also an open access project (completely decentralized) called Ripple.