SWAPEROO: a simple wallet architecture for payments, exchanges, refunds, and other operations

Abstract

Most existing digital wallet implementations support a single or a limited set of proprietary financial instruments and protocols for electronic commerce transactions, preventing a user from having one consolidated digital wallet to manage all of his or her financial instruments. Commercial efforts to implement extensible digital wallets that are capable of inter-operating with multiple instruments and protocols are a step in the right direction, but these wallets have other limitations. In this paper, we propose a new digital wallet architecture that is extensible (can support multiple existing and newly developed instruments and protocols), symmetric (has common instrument management and protocol management interfaces across end-user, vendor, and bank applications), nonweb -centric (can be implemented in non-web environments), and client-driven (the user initiates all operations, including wallet invocation). 1.0 Introduction A number of electronic commerce applications allow end-us...