How does Stripe's patent application differ from its competition?

Question

Patent application US20130117185 from Stripe is for a “Method for conducting a transaction between a merchant site and a customer’s electronic device without exposing payment information to a server-side application of the merchant site”.

It seems to me that a similar method (client-side credit card tokenization) is already adopted and implemented by many payment providers (Braintree, CardVault, VantageB2B, PayLeap, and many others), unless I missed some subtleties of the aforementioned patent which would allow distinguishing Stripe from the competition.

Could someone help to clarify which part of the Stripe patent application is really unique compared to what the competition does?

Answer 1

Well, there appears to be a corresponding PCT application from STRIPE with a seemingly identical claim set, WO2013067121. For this PCT application, the USPTO acted as the International Searching Authority and found all claims to lack inventive step in light of multiple prior art documents. See Documents -> " International Preliminary Report on Patentability Chapter I" of 06.05.2014 here:

http://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/WO2013067121

It appears the US application mentioned by the OP is processed by a different examiner. I am not sure how good the USPTO IT systems are at automatically alerting examiners of co-pending international applications from the same applicant sharing the same (partial) priority claims. I guess time will tell...