Global credit card company Mastercard has filed a patent application with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for the creation of refund services for digital currency users. In the patent titled “Information Transaction Infrastructure,” the company hinted at its plan to explore possible means of implementing this feature.

Based on the application published by the USPTO on Aug. 3, 2017, the sole inventor of the proposed tool was former Mastercard senior analyst Vladimir Goloschuk.

Some key details of the patent application

Based on the published document, the proposed service will establish an infrastructure that would allow users to verify their identities and link them to the digital currency addresses that they had chosen to disclose. An example of how the system will work was also presented.

Part of the document reads:

“A typical transaction involving a payment from Alice to Bob operates in the following way. Bob creates a new address using the cryptocurrency client and provides the address to Alice as a destination for the payment. Alice makes the transaction using her cryptocurrency client by indicating a payment to the address indicated by Bob from one of her own addresses – this is done by signing a transaction request with her private key for the address, the public key being usable to establish that the transaction was sent by Alice to Bob’s address.”

The system being proposed by Mastercard aims to facilitate the refund process in payment transactions.

Under the current system, a customer who requests a refund must have the funds sent back to the same address they paid from. Mastercard suggests the creation of a service that will allow users to choose to send refunds to a different wallet address. This system will help facilitate the refund of payments much easier and quicker as part of the application explains:

“The first party private address is not communicated to the second party, but the first party public address is communicated to the second party. This approach is particularly suitable for transfer of cryptocurrency, as it allows for an effective refund mechanism.”

Mastercard is not the only financial institution in the race for patent approval. In fact, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, are some of the leading applicants for the increasing applications that USPTO has received in the first quarter of 2017 whose applications are still pending approval.