Patent Issued for Model-based configuration of financial product offerings (USPTO 11830074): Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America

2023 DEC 18 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- According to news reporting originating from Alexandria, Virginia, by NewsRx journalists, a patent by the inventors Agrawal, Pankaj (Concord, NC, US), Bahns, Gregory B. (West Chester, OH, US), Hintze, John V. (Charlotte, NC, US), Hursh, Daniel R. (Dayton, OH, US), Miller, Jr., Edward J. (Iola, KS, US), Pecoraro, Alexis S. (Huntersville, NC, US), Rauscher, James G (Erie, CO, US), filed on October 25, 2019, was published online on November 28, 2023.

The assignee for this patent, patent number 11830074, is Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America (New York, New York, United States).

Reporters obtained the following quote from the background information supplied by the inventors: “A financial institution may offer a variety of products to individual and/or institutional clients. Examples of financial institutions include, but are not limited to, banks, building societies, credit unions, trust companies, mortgage loan companies, insurance companies, investment banks, underwriters, brokerage firms, etc. Examples of financial products include retirement accounts, annuity contracts, individual retirement accounts, target date funds, etc.”

In addition to obtaining background information on this patent, NewsRx editors also obtained the inventors’ summary information for this patent: “Described herein are methods and systems for model-based configuration of financial product offerings.

“A financial product offering (e.g., a retirement account, an annuity contract, an individual retirement account, or a target date fund, etc.) may include multiple services (e.g., eligibility service, enrollment service, contribution calculation service, disbursement service, etc.) that should be configured in accordance with the financial product definition provisions, pertinent regulations, administrative practices, and/or various other rules and specifications. The resulting configuration would define all service configuration options, preferences, and parameters, inter-dependencies, and interfaces of the services employed by the financial product offering.

“In various common implementations, the configuration tasks are mostly performed by financial institution personnel and involve perusing the product requirement and definition documents, templates, third-party documents, etc., in order to produce a set of weakly-structured documents (e.g., flat files or spreadsheets) specifying the requisite service configuration options, preferences, and parameters. Apart from being labor intensive, such processes are error prone, often resulting in suboptimal or even defective service configurations.

“Systems and methods of the present disclosure address the above-noted deficiencies of various common implementations by employing an automated service configuration process that utilizes a graph model representing a multitude of possible permutations of financial product definition provisions, collects the pertinent information related to the customer requirements and business practices, applies the collected information to at least a subset of the graph model in order to identify the service configuration, and generates service configuration data in the form that is consumable by the downstream systems (e.g., service provisioning agents).

“In an illustrative example, a multitude of possible permutations of financial product definition provisions may be represented by a graph model, also referred to as “offering mesh” herein. The nodes of the offering mesh may represent various data points related to one or more services employed by a financial product, while the edges may represent relationships among the data points.”

The claims supplied by the inventors are:

“1. A method, comprising: receiving, by a computer system, a graph model representing a plurality of permutations of definition provisions of a financial product; translating, by the computer system applying a first set of translation rules, at least a subset of the graph model into definitions of a plurality of business objects, wherein each translation rule of the first set of translation rules specifies a first template to be applied to the subset of the graph model, an object type, and one or more object attribute values of a business object to be generated responsive to determining that the first template specified by the translation rule matches the subset of the graph model; translating, by the computer system applying a second set of translation rules, the definitions of the plurality of business objects into definitions of a plurality of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) services to be implemented by an offering of the financial product, wherein each translation rule of the second set of translation rules specifies a second template to be applied to a business object definition and executable code for implementing an SOA service of the plurality of SOA services, the executable code to be generated responsive to determining that the second template matches the business object definition, wherein the definitions of the plurality of SOA services include at least one of: a client information service definition, a compensation deferral agreement service definition, an eligibility service definition, a contributions limits monitoring service definition, a contribution calculation service definition, a vesting service definition, or a disbursement service definition; receiving, by the computer system, via a user interface, a plurality of service configuration options; applying, by the computer system, the plurality of service configuration options to the definitions of the plurality of SOA services; generating, by the computer system, based on the definitions of the plurality of SOA services, service configuration data for the offering of the financial product; supplying, via a publishing application programming interface (API), the service configuration data to one or more service provisioning agents; transforming, by the one or more service provisioning agents, the service configuration data into a system configuration; determining, by applying a set of rules to the system configuration, one or more system configuration parameters; and provisioning, by one or more provisioning agents, based on the one or more system configuration parameters, a computer and a software module for implementing the financial product offering comprising the plurality of SOA services.

“2. The method of claim 1, wherein applying the plurality of service configuration options to the definitions of the plurality of SOA services further comprises: validating the plurality of service configuration options based on the definitions of the plurality of services.

“3. The method of claim 1, wherein the financial product is represented by one of: a retirement account, an annuity contract, an individual retirement account, or a target date fund.

“4. The method of claim 1, further comprising: supplying the service configuration data to one or more provisioning agents.

“5. The method of claim 1, further comprising: receiving, via the user interface, a plurality of service configuration parameters; validating the plurality of service configuration parameters based on the definitions of the plurality of SOA services; and applying the plurality of service configuration parameters to the definitions of the plurality of SOA services.

“6. The method of claim 1, further comprising: receiving, via the user interface, a plurality of service configuration preferences; and applying the plurality of service configuration preferences to the definitions of the plurality of SOA services.

“7. The method of claim 1, wherein translating the definitions of the plurality of business objects into definitions of the plurality of services further comprises: identifying the plurality of service configuration options to be received via the user interface.

“8. The method of claim 1, wherein receiving the plurality of service configuration options further comprises: rendering, via the user interface, representations of the definitions of the plurality of SOA services.

“9. The method of claim 1, wherein receiving the plurality of service configuration options further comprises: applying input validation rules to the plurality of service configuration options.

“10. A system, comprising: a memory; and a processing device operatively coupled to the memory, wherein the processing device is configured to: receive a graph model representing a plurality of permutations of definition provisions of a financial product; translate, by applying a first set of translation rules, at least a subset of the graph model into definitions of a plurality of business objects, wherein each translation rule of the first set of translation rules specifies a first template to be applied to the subset of the graph model, an object type, and one or more object attribute values of a business object to be generated responsive to determining that the first template specified by the translation rule matches the subset of the graph model; translate, by applying a second set of translation rules, the definitions of the plurality of business objects into definitions of a plurality of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) services to be implemented by an offering of the financial product, wherein each translation rule of the second set of translation rules specifies a second template to be applied to a business object definition and executable code for implementing an SOA service of the plurality of SOA services, the executable code to be generated responsive to determining that the second template matches the business object definition, wherein the definitions of the plurality of SOA services include at least one of: a client information service definition, a compensation deferral agreement service definition, an eligibility service definition, a contributions limits monitoring service definition, a contribution calculation service definition, a vesting service definition, or a disbursement service definition; receive, via a user interface, a plurality of service configuration options; apply the plurality of service configuration options to the definitions of the plurality of services; generate, based on the definitions of the plurality of services, service configuration data for the offering of the financial product; supply, via a publishing application programming interface (API), the service configuration data to one or more service provisioning agents; transform, by the one or more service provisioning agents, the service configuration data into a system configuration; determine, by applying a set of rules to the system configuration, one or more system configuration parameters; and provision, by one or more provisioning agents, based on the one or more system configuration parameters, a computer and a software module for implementing the financial product offering comprising the plurality of SOA services.

“11. The system of claim 10, wherein applying the plurality of service configuration options to the definitions of the plurality of services further comprises: validating the plurality of service configuration options based on the definitions of the plurality of SOA services.

“12. The system of claim 10, wherein the financial product is represented by one of: a retirement account, an annuity contract, an individual retirement account, or a target date fund.

“13. The system of claim 10, wherein the processing device is further configured to: supply the service configuration data to one or more provisioning agents.

“14. The system of claim 10, wherein translating the definitions of the plurality of business objects into definitions of the plurality of services further comprises: identifying the plurality of service configuration options to be received via the user interface.

“15. The system of claim 10, wherein receiving the plurality of service configuration options further comprises: rendering, via the user interface, representations of the definitions of the plurality of SOA services.

“16. The system of claim 10, wherein receiving the plurality of service configuration options further comprises: applying input validation rules to the plurality of service configuration options.”

There are additional claims. Please visit full patent to read further.

For more information, see this patent: Agrawal, Pankaj. Model-based configuration of financial product offerings. U.S. Patent Number 11830074, filed October 25, 2019, and published online on November 28, 2023. Patent URL (for desktop use only): https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/external.html?q=(11830074)&db=USPAT&type=ids

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