Posts Tagged: "Citigroup patents"

Banks playing patent catch-up with tech companies on digital wallets, payment platforms

Mobile payment schemes and digital wallets have been a major topic of discussion in tech circles this year. In early December, Walmart (NYSE:WMT) became the first American retailer to announce its own mobile payment system that will be rolled out next year. Even in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Alice, we have seen an interesting increase in the amount of patent filing activity for mobile payment systems from each of the three largest banks as valued by assets. This is a peculiar about-face from a sector that, until tech companies started encroaching on financial services, had rallied against strong patent rights for software for quite some time.

Major Banks Innovating to Increase Consumer Security

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.