INNOVATION: BofA Plays IP Hardball

If you or your bank are engaged in mobile banking, relationship marketing, data-mining for banking customers, or giving consumers control over their personal information, take heed. Bank of America Corp. is trying to secure patents that theoretically might force you to pay it licensing fees.

Way deep below the radar, BofA has filed four patent requests over the last six months that would give the megabank seemingly substantial IP muscle. The four applications broadly deal with data mining and mobile banking. In its "Systems and Methods for Providing a Consumption Network" application, for example, BofA is seeking a patent to a product that allows consumers to "share one's transactions while allowing others to access this aggregated data when interested in making specific financial decisions--e.g., buying a product or researching a service." Sounds a lot like Mint.com to me. Another patent, meanwhile, would give BofA the sole rights to the IP for "a method for conducting a financial transaction [involving] a person using a mobile device." The

application explains that BofA wants a patent for a "mobile device [that] accesses information regarding the proposed financial transaction and determines, based on that information, whether the proposed transaction is permissible according to pre-set preferences associated with the person." Doesn't that cover nearly every mobile banking app ever conceived?

Whether these applications will be granted to BofA is, of course, unclear. But these patents are obviously outgrowths of BofA's Center for Future Banking at MIT. Jeff Carter, who is listed as one of the inventors on the patent applications, was BofA's first executive stationed at the CFB. Carter is no longer with BofA.

As I was reading through BofA's patent applications, I couldn't help but think of that Research in Motion-NTP Inc. patent debacle in 2000. If you recall, NTP shut down RIM (in other words, all BlackBerrys) because of a patent dispute. It was not pretty.

According to Patentdocs, BofA has received 13 patents since 2008 -- not enough to put it in NTP's class, but worthy of the banking industry's collective attention.

Tags: bank-of-america, intellectual-property, law, litigation, mint.com, mobile-banking, patents

Comment by Jeffry Pilcher on March 3, 2010 at 5:51pm: There is no telling how the US Patent & Trademark Office will decide on anything. Sometimes you'd swear they were going to reject an application because there were obviously so many other prior examples, then…approved!

That picture looks like Jean Claude Van Damme + Brian Bosworthy's love child.