mCom IP, LLC has continued to add defendants to its “unified banking systems” campaign, suing Cullen/Frost Bankers (6:22-cv-001148), Goldman Sachs (4:22-cv-03821), and HM Treasury (Citizens Bank) (3:22-cv-02447) so far in November after hitting American Express (6:22-cv-01134) and Citibank (3:22-cv-02398) at the end of October. These new cases bring above three dozen the number of defendants sued in this campaign, not all of which are banks. Among them is Cisco, targeted over its “Digital Banking Solution”, which this summer brought to a magistrate judge’s attention a decision by District Judge Alan D. Albright granting a stay pending the resolution of an inter partes review (IPR) in a case in a separate campaign. The company sought to convince the magistrate that this other order acted to “clarify the practice” in the Western District of Texas for stays pending instituted IPR proceedings—i.e., that the bar to such a stay is not as high as might be generally perceived. A couple of weeks ago, Judge Albright, having taken over the Cisco case after the magistrate’s recusal, denied the motion to stay.

As recently reported in RPX’s Q1 in Review, NPE litigation targeting the Financial Services sector jumped by 111% during the first quarter of 2021. That Q1 wave of Financial Services litigation was filed by a variety of NPE plaintiffs, including several inventor-controlled entities; an NPE associated with the monetization firm Dynamic IP Deals, LLC (d/b/a DynaIP); and an affiliate of prolific filer IP Edge LLC.

IP Edge LLC plaintiff Xylon Licensing LLC has taken over the litigation campaign that fellow IP Edge entity Kwality IP LLC launched in September 2020, suing Amergy Bankcorporation (6:21-cv-00098), BOK Financial (6:21-cv-00099), South Plains Financial (6:21-cv-00100), and Texas State Bankshares (6:21-cv-00101) in the Western District of Texas. The plaintiff asserts a single patent—acquired from Empire Technology Development LLC—generally related to completing a secure transaction over a mobile device, where a portion of the transaction is completed through a “customer secure computing device”. The defendants are accused of infringement through the provision of mobile point-of-sale (POS) systems, including credit card readers and related mobile apps. Kwality IP transferred the patent to Xylon in January 2021, several weeks after dismissing its last active case, against Global Payments.

IP Edge LLC, through plaintiff Kwality IP LLC, has targeted mobile point-of-sale systems, including credit card readers and accompanying mobile apps, in one of the many campaigns that the Texas monetization firm began at the end of September. The complaints target features related to making secure financial transactions in such products provided by Allied Wallet (2:20-cv-08917), Global Payments (1:20-cv-04021), MasterCard (1:20-cv-01315), ShopKeep (1:20-cv-01316), or Square (1:20-cv-01317). Kwality IP’s is one of a growing number of campaigns to arise from portfolios that IP Edge has picked up from Empire Technology Development LLC over the past year.