Posts Tagged: "mobile payments"

Blockchain technology has already disrupted the financial sector and new blockchain use cases are emerging every day — from corruption-proof land registries to licensing digital assets, to tracking individual diamonds. In fact, there are many who say that blockchain technology has the potential to be as disruptive as the Internet… To stop patent trolls, the Chamber of Digital Commerce launched the Blockchain Intellectual Property Council (BIPC) this year. BIPC’s goal is to develop a global, industry-led defensive patent strategy that will nip blockchain patent trolling in the bud. Its first meeting on March 30th attracted 40 participants. In the next meeting in April, that number rose to 70. The BIPC executive committee members are the “who’s who” list of blockchain stakeholders, including Chain, Digital Asset, IBM, Microsoft, CoinDesk, Blockstream, Bloq, Civic, Cognizant, Deloitte, Digital Currency Group, Ernst & Young, Gem, Medici Ventures, T0.com, TMX and Wipfli.

In November 2016, European Payments Council (EPC) launched the SEPA Instant Credit Transfer scheme. With this move, the payment coordination body of the European banking industry has placed over 34 European countries at the center-stage of mobile payments. This scheme will not only spearhead adoption of instant mobile payments and transactions worldwide, but also push the major economies of the World to start regulating the unstructured and incomplete mobile payments legal framework. Growing adoption of mobile payments and steps taken by other regulatory bodies of the world like EPC will certainly push USA to update its own regulatory and legal framework.

U.S. Patent No. 9378491, entitled Payment Transfer by Sending E-mail. This discloses a computer-implemented method which enables the seamless initiation of a payment transfer through e-mail from one mobile device to another without creating an account or logging into a service. The innovative system is designed for both simplicity of use as well as security and authentication in online financial transactions. A final rejection issued by a patent examiner on the ‘491 patent dated December 8th, 2014, doesn’t specifically mention Alice v. CLS, but the case’s effect on the examiner’s decision seemed evident. In arguments made in response to the final rejection, Square’s prosecution team on the ‘491 patent noted that it had amended the claims to make the patentable features of those claims more explicit.

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.

The model for implementing digital wallets has largely relied upon what is known as the four-corner payment model by incorporating the use of payment cards, such as debit cards. Market research firm Research and Markets has reported that nearly three-quarters of all mobile digital wallets are funded by payment cards. By the end of 2013, 22 percent of the world’s population owned a smartphone, so it’s not inconceivable to think of a time in the future where credit and debit cards will become obviated by near-field communications (NFC) payment systems on smartphones entirely, despite the major rollout of payment cards with EMV computer chips by financial institutions. Today, we’ll take a look at the top three contenders in the mobile payment world to see what we can expect from each in the coming months.

Priceline has battled back from the dot-com bubble bursting to become the strongest selling stock on the S&P 500 with a market cap of about $66.8 billion. A number of the patents recently issued to Priceline Group companies protect technologies that make it easier to find the travel accommodations people need to enjoy their vacations or pursue their business needs. For example, more accurate search engine results for engines that have to navigate massive datasets to return suggestions to a user is the focus of U.S. Patent No. 8972434, entitled Multi-Phase Search and Presentation for Vertical Search Websites. This patent, assigned to Kayak, discloses a computer program product storing code executable to operate a travel reservation search engine with a query interface module to receive a user search input with a constraint, a constraint evaluation module that can generate queries configured to obtain fewer search results or achieve a quicker response time, and a website query module that executes the multiple queries.