AuthWallet, LLC has filed second suits against Amarillo National Bank (7:24-cv-00064), Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC Bank USA) (7:24-cv-00065), Cullen/Frost Bankers (7:24-cv-00066), Fiserv (7:24-cv-00063), and PNC Financial Services Group (7:24-cv-00067), again in the Western District of Texas. The defendants are again accused of infringement over the support of certain mobile banking/payment functionalities in various financial products. The first cases against these defendants, filed in February 2023, faced serious headwinds, the defendants immediately challenging the sufficiency of AuthWallet’s (sometimes facially incomplete) infringement allegations in its pleadings and then raising the Federal Circuit’s May 2023 affirmance of an invalidation under Alice of a “closely related patent” of AuthWallet.

AuthWallet, LLC has filed a fresh round of complaints in its sole litigation campaign, suing Amarillo National Bank (6:23-cv-00140), Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC Bank) (6:23-cv-00141), Cullen/Frost Bankers (6:23-cv-00143), First Citizens Bancshares (First Citizens Bank) (6:23-cv-00144), Fiserv (6:23-cv-00145), and PNC Financial Services (6:23-cv-00146) in the Western District of Texas. The asserted patent generally relates to processing financial transaction data, with the defendants accused of infringement through the support for certain mobile banking and payment functionalities, including Apple’s Apple Pay service.

As recently reported by RPX in its Q4 in Review, NPE litigation targeting the Financial Services sector rose in 2021, with double the number of defendants added to litigation compared to 2020. The plaintiffs active in this sector today include several inventor-controlled NPEs, a publicly traded patent assertion entity, two Texas-based monetization firms, and multiple prolific litigants.

Authwallet LLC—an entity created in Illinois in May 2020—has been litigating a portfolio of financial transaction processing patents since June of that year, in past cases against American Express, Citigroup, and Visa and in an active suit against Square. However, an “Authorization Wallet LLC”, pleading that it is a Texas LLC, has just attempted to assert the patent that currently available USPTO records suggest is still held by the Illinois Authwallet and that the current docket in the Square case indicates remains in suit there. The new defendants are retailers Nordstrom (6:21-cv-01120) and Starbucks (6:21-cv-01123). However, Texas state records raise an additional question about the status of this new “Authorization Wallet”: whether it exists.

In August 2020, Illinois NPE Authwallet LLC voluntarily dismissed a case against Visa, the first suit in its sole litigation campaign launched last June. Authwallet has now added cases against American Express (1:21-cv-03219) in the Southern District of New York and Citigroup (4:21-cv-01203) in the Southern District of Texas. The plaintiff asserts in each complaint a single patent generally related to processing financial transaction data with certain “processing rules”, with the defendants accused of infringement through the provision of their respective cardholder reward programs. At issue are features for notifying users of transactions where discounts and/or credits can be applied.