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.

Texas Secure Authentication, LLC has sued a second bank in the Western District of Texas. Last November the inventor-controlled plaintiff hit FCT Bancshares (First National Bank of Central Texas) with a single patent generally related to determining identification through multiple information containers and registers. Little happened through dismissal of that case, without prejudice, in early June 2021; now, Texas Secure has sued Cullen/Frost Bankers (Frost Bank) (6:21-cv-01069) over the same patent, with infringement allegations again targeting the use of multi-factor authentication methods in online banking and Internet services.

Banks and other financial institutions may be the next targets of claims arising from a family of patents that ran into Alice trouble the first time around. Inventor-controlled Texas Secure Authentication, LLC has accused FCT Bancshares (First National Bank of Central Texas) (6:20-cv-01091) of infringing a single patent, generally related to determining identification through multiple information containers and registers, through the use of multi-factor authentication methods in its online banking and Internet services. The named inventor moved the asserted patent away from Evolutionary Intelligence LLC, which sued Apple, Facebook, Foursquare, Groupon, LivingSocial, Millienial Media, Sprint, Twitter, and Yelp in a pre-Alice campaign that met its patent-ineligibility demise in October 2015.