Posts Tagged: "banks"

Financial Institutions Face Fork in Patent Road

Large banks have a reputation for being slow to change. However, in the past decade, the financial services industry has seen the wholesale adoption and implementation of new technology as firms realize that consumers and businesses are increasingly demanding a strong digital experience. In 2007, Bank of America was one of the first financial institutions to offer a mobile banking application and since then, the rest of the industry has followed suit. Now, consumers could not go without their banking apps ­– imagine going to the bank to deposit a check.

Is being called a ‘patent troll’ defamatory? NH inventor files suit against banking industry to find out

In a New Hampshire State Superior Court, this so-called ‘patent troll’ has decided to fight back. Automated Transactions and Dave Barcelou have filed a defamation complaint against the crème de la crème of those deemed “too big to fail” and who many might consider to be too big to defeat… The minute Barcelou was able to enforce his patented technologies in court, winning a sizable settlement from the biggest bank in his hometown of Buffalo, NY, a veritable “Who’s Who” of the financial services leaders joined forces to destroy both Barcelou and his company economically. Besides encouraging one another to ignore Automated Transaction’s demand letters, false and misleading statements started to appear in prominent business publications, which went so far as to say the company had purchased its patents, or alternatively, that the patents were invalid. Over time a unified battle cry arose from the ‘poor little community banks’ he allegedly targeted; “He’s nothing but a patent troll.”

What’s the big deal: Big data in the financial services sector

Customers, myself included, are used to the customer-centric technologies experienced in other ‘digitized’ sectors like publishing or music – these have had to adapt to the digital revolution early. Customers now want that experience replicated in the FS sector. Banks, for example, are beginning to take notice, investing significant amounts of money in IT upgrades: Australia’s Commonwealth Bank invested over AUD $1.1 billion in an end-to-end IT transformation project to replace its aging core banking system and Barclays has been promoting customer-centric technologies like the mobile payments app PingIt for many years.

BoA innovations cover security for financial transactions, wearable payment devices, cryptocurrency

Many of the patents we noticed in our recent survey of BofA technologies are related to enhanced security methods for financial transactions, such as the innovation protected by U.S. Patent No. 9218596, entitled Method and Apparatus for Providing Real Time Mutable Credit Card Information. It discloses a smartcard apparatus having a microprocessor chip, a button, a dynamic transaction authorization number and a Bluetooth low energy device (BLE) that works to transmit an instruction to a smartphone for a request for a dynamic transaction authorization number when the button is depressed and receive the number from the smartphone; the smartcard further has a battery and a dynamic magnetic strip comprising a digital representation of the dynamic authorization number. This technology is designed to enhance security measures in smartcards having magnetic strips without requiring a banking institution to issue new cards. Enhanced security for banking transactions taking place on cloud infrastructures is featured within U.S. Patent No. 9184918, entitled Trusted Hardware for Attesting to Authenticity in a Cloud Environment. I

The Top 10 Patents Issued in 2015

2015 was a truly remarkable year for innovation and we saw major trends in self-driving cars, wearable technologies, digital wallets and much more. I hope you will enjoy this top 10 listing, which includes innovations for providing water in arid regions, wireless charging systems for electronic devices and even the collection and retransmission of sunlight. Of course, as with all of these types of lists, the criteria used for inclusion on this list is subjective, based on my own personal preferences. Please feel free to let us know if you saw something particularly noteworthy in 2015.