If, like me, you sometimes use a credit card to pay fees when filing a US trademark application, then you are accustomed to having to key in a sixteen-digit credit card number to pay the filing fee.  Indeed you are accustomed to having to key in six categories of information — the credit card number, the expiration date, the CCV code, the cardholder name, the billing address, and the billing Zip code.

But as of today, you can skip all of that.  You can use USPTO’s new Financial Manager (FM) system to store payment methods.  When you do this (see screen shot at right), you can choose “stored payment method”.  Then you select a stored payment method from a drop-down list.  In this case I selected a Visa card.  Then you key in the card security code and click “submit”.

This saves you having to key in five of the six categories of information mentioned above.

If you have not stored any payment methods in FM, then you can still proceed in the old-fashioned way, choosing “credit/debit card” and hand-keying the six categories of information.

In an office having high rates of employee turnover, this system will permit an employee to pay a trademark fee without the need to provide the actual credit card number or expiration date to the employee.

The FM system has been available for two weeks now.  Presumably you configured your FM user accounts two weeks ago.  But if you have not done so yet, you can visit the Financial Manager setup page to set things up.

Have you successfully paid a trademark fee using this new “stored payment” method?  If so, please post a comment below and let me know how it went.