Fuzzy Virtual Card Agent for Customizing Divisible Card Payments

E-commerce customers may have a problem when paying for the purchase of a major item, if its price is larger than the available credit on their credit card. In the brick and mortar world, this problem would be solved by paying part of the bill with cash or with a second credit card. In e-commerce, however, this has not been an option. Furthermore, even when a customer could pay the whole purchase with one of her credit cards, she may prefer to first max out another card with a lower interest rate. The overall goal of this research is to provide customers with the capability of customizing their payments by splitting an e-commerce payment over multiple cards, while taking into account a set of competing preferences over policies and constraints of various cards in determining which cards to use. This paper presents an intelligent card management system, called Fuzzy Virtual Card Agent (f-VA) that supports the customer’s divisible payment decision. By modeling the customer’s preferences using weighted fuzzy set memberships, the f-VA considers the preferences over the card issuers’ policies, such as credit limits, interest rates and many others as well as the policies imposed by the secondary issuers, such as employers, and suggests the best combination of cards to the customer. The customer can take advantage of the suggestion by the f-VA or modify it immediately on the Web. Our approach provides customers with a more flexible card payment method for online purchases and can be extended to any types of purchases, such as mobile commerce payments.