Who Goes There? Protecting Intellectual Property Relating To Payment Innovation

The payments space is undergoing a period of rapid innovation, resulting in traditional financial institutions competing more and more directly with large technology companies such as Apple, Google, Samsung and Facebook. Unsurprisingly, various players in the payments industry have been filing patents to protect their proprietary technologies for various payment functionalities, ranging from central elements of a payment transaction (such as core payment processing algorithms), to other ancillary, but necessary, aspects of a payment transaction, such as authentication and tokenization methods.

Apple has been active in filing patents covering vastly different technologies in the payments space. For example, two of its recently published US applications relate to: a ring-based system for executing electronic payments and an electronic payment system secured by a touch from a user.