Importance

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Abstract

The system described is an electronic payment and loyalty systems for retail and automatic unattended vending. In particular the invention relates to an electronic payment and loyalty system wherein the customer account information is cached in a nonvolatile memory on the payment terminal or point of sale system while addressing the problems of securely storing customer account information, operation of the system during a failure of the server or network, and the use of customer account synchronization scheduling to limit merchant fraud risk in a network or retail locations and to maximize the peak transaction capacity of the available server and network infrastructure. When the customer account information is not available at the payment terminal, transactions are processed with an online connection to the payment server. The invention allows customers to use and fund electronic stored value accounts at merchant locations without the need for an online connection to the payment system server.

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First Claim