Appeal 2007-2451
Application 10/694,925
1 ISSUES
2 The Examiner finds that Blossom discloses receiving at a POS device a cost for
3 a transaction identifying an instrument associated with a stored-value account and
4 a credit account and generating a request to select a distribution of the cost for the
5 transaction among the stored-value and credit accounts for presentation at the
6 point-of-sale device. The Examiner finds that the step of transmitting the cost
7 payment to the financial institution is obvious and old to the card reader art and is
8 accomplished in Cameron. (Answer 4.)
9 However, the Examiner finds that Blossom does not disclose the stored-value
10 account and the credit account linked substantially contemporaneously with
11 issuance of the instrument to the customer, nor does it teach a selected distribution
12 identifying a first non zero portion of the cost of the trans action applied to a stored
13 value and a second non zero portion of the cost of the transaction to be applied to a
14 credit card. (Answer 4.)
15 To overcome this deficiency, the Examiner finds that Cameron discloses
16 selecting a non zero portion of a charge to be allocated between two credit cards, a
17 credit card and a stored value instrument, or between two stored value instruments.
18 The Examiner concludes that it would have been obvious to modify the POS sales
19 device of Blossom to include the receiving at the POS terminal of a response in the
20 form of an elective distribution feature of allocating payments between stored
21 value gift certificate and credit card as taught by Cameron to limit the use of the
22 credit cards and their attendant high rates of interest. (Answer 4.)
23 The Examiner finds that Cameron provides the limitation of substantially
24 contemporaneously linking the stored values and the credit card, based on its
25 scheme of Fig. 1 showing a linked system, which the Examiner reads as being
4
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Last modified: September 9, 2013