ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 25 -- United States Patent no. 12,340,352, issued on June 24, was assigned to Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Redmond, Wash.).

"Extensible interface for synchronous and asynchronous payment" was invented by Sarah Waskom (Seattle), Cherie Kwan (Woodinville, Wash.), Dale Lemieux (Bellevue, Wash.), George Li (Redmond, Wash.), Aravind Aluri (Redmond, Wash.), Huiyong Xiao (Redmond, Wash.), Arik Cohen (Bellevue, Wash.) and Joel Botner (Bellevue, Wash.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An applications programming interface (API) or other interface may be configured for use with a plurality of e-commerce applications and/or a plurality of payment systems. The API may be associa...