Banking & Financial Services - New Venues for IP Licensing, or Death by Bilski?

Traditionally, intellectual property development and management has been considered the bastion of “high-tech” companies – examples abound of firms in the semiconductor, telecom and pharmaceutical industries that maintain robust IP development and licensing programs.  While this remains more or less true today, increasingly firms outside of the traditional high-tech rubric are developing IP development and management programs of their own.  This is most apparent in the fields of banking and financial services.

Patent filings related to banking and financial services are nothing new; indeed, the CAFC’s opinion in State Street Bank v. Signature Financial Group (149 F.3d 1368 (Fed. Cir. 1998), which heralded the beginnings of business method patents, was based upon a patent filing disclosing a method to monitor and record financial information flows.  However, even with State Street, patent filings related to banking and financial management have remained at relatively low levels.  To some extent, this can be attributed to financial institutions’ traditional reliance on trade secret laws to protect their proprietary business processes.  But with the growing importance of intellectual property to all companies, financial institutions are becoming more and more attuned to the importance of patent filings, as well as other forms of registered IP rights.  An interesting article found at http://www.banktech.com/feed/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206904966 discusses this trend.

The irony of this development is that just as financial institutions are gearing up to be more active in regard to patent filings, business method patents are at risk due to the Bilski case, now pending before the CAFC.  (For more information on the Bilski case, please refer to the prior post on this blog regarding Bilski.)  As such, Bilski may indeed be one of the most far-reaching CAFC rulings in some time, and certainly will be of interest to not just patent attorneys and agents, but also to a wide swath of industries looking to develop their own IP development and management programs.