Posts Tagged: "banks"

Regulations will likely start rolling out in the coming year starting at the state level. In May of last year, for example, the New York State Department of Financial Services released a report which said that the agency would add cybersecurity measures to the list of items that it investigates when evaluating a bank’s overall safety and soundness. New York, and New York City in particular, is home to a huge banking industry that represents some of our nation’s largest financial institutions, including American Express, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. According to remarks made by NYS DFS Superintendent Benjamin Lawsky in late February, state regulations could involve the use of multi-layer authentication systems for firms regulated by the DFS.

The big banks have backed Schumer for years, which makes sense since he is the senior Senator from the States of New York, which is where all the bankers are located (i.e., on Wall Street). But given all the vitriol aimed at software patents, particularly those in the financial services sector, there is a real irony that big banks are able to get software patents that explicitly cover computer implemented methods in the wake of Alice v. CLS Bank when so many others aren’t. So much of this anti-software patent hysteria was started by the big banks but they seem unaffected. That is an unfortunate theme in America. The big banks on Wall Street destroyed the economy with reckless disregard and yet not a single person went to jail and big bonuses continued to be paid to the very bankers and executives responsible for the economic meltdown that lead to the Great Recession.

What really caught our attention were the patent claims JPMorgan Chase recently obtained. Many of the claims cover computer implemented processes, while many are clearly drawn to software innovations even if they don’t specifically define computer implemented processes in the preamble of the claims. It would seem that like Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase is not suffering through Alice rejections that so many others experience.

There are plenty of patents being issued to these giants of the banking industry which protect methods of processing transactions or performing other services through computer technologies. This year’s Supreme Court decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International has drawn a lot of attention to software patents, and particularly the type of financial service software patents that were protected by the Alice Corporation patent. The Supreme Court specifically cited that fact that the software was related to financial transactions as at least some reason to rule the patent claims invalid. Yet, there are a number of patents we noticed which were recently issued to these financial corporations involving software technologies for financial services.

Rather than profile a single company we looked at patents and patent applications from the likes of Bank of America, American Express, Capital One and more. Our recent review of the sector continues to show us some astonishing inventions. Today’s featured patent application comes from Capital One and protects an attachment to mobile devices which establishes a network for handing digital transactions. This attachment would enable a user’s device to be retrofitted so that it can be easily operated as a digital wallet. Methods of tracking online payments through mobile devices, as well as a system for quickly processing loans for online auto sales, are discussed in other patent applications we discuss.

Today, we’ve profiled an assortment of patent applications and issued patents coming out of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that are assigned to Citigroup Technology of New York, NY; The Bank of America Corporation of Charlotte, NC; and JPMorgan Chase Bank, also of New York, NY. We’ve checked out a few inventions that show the desire of banking corporations to stem the recent tide of major identity theft scandals. Our featured application today takes a look at a new design for a magnetic stripe card reader that would have impeded the progress of criminals who recently stole personal financial information from millions of Target customers. Other patent applications we noticed include a system for identifying phishing websites that steal customer information across the World Wide Web, as well as a personal budgeting manager for financial accounts. These three banking companies have also been receiving patents from the USPTO at a fair clip in recent days, although Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase are paced well ahead of Citigroup in this regard. We discuss a couple of new banking inventions that aim to take advantage of mobile networks and devices, including one patent protecting a system of providing offers to individuals from nearby businesses. Other patents include a system of collecting unused coinage for redistribution among banks and systems for funding an account collectively among many contributors.