PASHAs for management of credit cards and other financial transactions

Users are frequently invited to subscribe to a service, or otherwise commit to periodic payments, using regular periodic charges to a credit card. However, many users have been frequently frustrated by the inflexibility of the current practices in accommodating desired changes to those charges. For example, charges to a credit card often continue after cancellation of a service, requiring lengthy communications in order to stop and reverse charges.

A PASHA can be authorized, with the agreement of the card-issuing bank, to clear all or some of the charges to a credit card before they are made. A user would only have to communicate with the PASHA, in natural language if desired, in order to instruct a bank to withhold payment. The same PASHA could be asked by the user to stop payment of all charges to a card that is misplaced or stolen. The communication with the PASHA might require a keyboard, but advanced releases may use speech recognition to make possible voice communication, even over the telephone. The relatively constrained context domain would make such communication eminently possible.

The PASHA could reside in the user’s computer and communicate with the financial institution’s computer over the internet in order to negotiate appropriate arrangements with the institution’s intelligent agents. Alternatively, the PASHA could reside in the financial institution’s computer and receive messages from the user over the internet or telephone. The latter option appears to be advantageous in terms of cost, security, and reliability.

A related service performed by a PASHA might be an improved replacement to the automated telephone services offered by most institutions which deal with large numbers of customers requiring a relatively limited range of services. Currently, these automated telephone services tend to be rather time-consuming, sometimes onerous, and often frustrating. With the assistance of a PASHA, a user could enter a request in natural language, and the request would be translated into the appropriate sequence of number inputs which would activate the proper response of the automated telephone service.