An electronic bill presentation and payment (EBPP) system that is able to
obtain bills for its customers from scrape-enabled biller Web sites. The
EBPP system has an interface which permits a customer to specify that the
customer wishes the EBPP system to retrieve a customer's bills from a
biller Web site at which the customer may access them. The customer
provides his or her access information for the biller Web site to the
EBPP system, which then uses a software agent to make scheduled scrapes
of the biller Web site to obtain the customer's bill. The software agent
scrapes not only bill summary information such as the account number, the
statement date, the bill amount, the payment due date, the minimum amount
and/or total amount due from the biller Web site, but also scrapes
display information for the bill. The display information is the HTML
that the biller Web site itself uses to display the bill. The agent
cleans the HTML so that it can be displayed in the environment provided
by the EBPP system. Both the bill summary information and the display
information are incorporated into databases maintained by the EBPP
system, which treats bills obtained from scrape-enabled Web sites in the
same fashion as bills obtained from other sources.