Wall Street’s New Cold War

An intellectual property arms race is escalating on Wall Street, where financial services firms like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are building up stockpiles of patents on processes like software-based pricing, trading and risk analysis systems and products like credit cards, exchange-traded funds and exotic derivatives. While there have been no big clashes yet, the question is, Which firm will be the first to try to enforce its growing portfolio of patents?

Patent activity among financial services firms began to soar in the late 1990’s, prompted by the boom in new technology and by the fact that banks were spending enormous sums to upgrade their in-house systems. A federal court decision in 1998 that software and business methods could be patented also fed the rush to seek patents.

•The result was a virtual stampede among top financial services firms to the United States Patent and Trademark Office. In 1997, there were 927 patent applications for various methods of processing financial and management data. Last year, there were 6,226.

“Try to find a major bank that doesn’t have an intellectual property program or in-house counsel capability in this area — I think that’s hard to find,” said Walter G. Hanchuk, a patent lawyer with Chadbourne & Parke. “People underestimate how much technology there is on Wall Street. It’s not just about a new credit card. There’s a lot of tech savvy behind that.”

Perennially understaffed and now overwhelmed by the sheer volume and complexity of these “dreamed up by a rocket engineer” financial products and systems, the patent office has struggled to keep up with the flood of applications. These days, banks and other financial giants are being granted patents they applied for four or even five years ago. Last year, more than 1,000 patents for processing financial and management data were approved, up from 200 in 1997.

Goldman, viewed by many as a patent leader on Wall Street, has hundreds of patent applications in the pipeline and has received patent rights on a couple of dozen products and systems, according to its chief patent officer, John Squires. He joined Goldman in the new position in 2000 after being a patent lawyer with Allied Signal.

For now, all the big firms seem to be playing nicely with one another. Many lawyers involved in patenting systems and products on Wall Street label the patents as defensive in nature. They say Wall Street banks are trying to patent products or software systems in an effort to protect themselves from claims or litigation brought by individuals or small companies whose primary business is holding patents — those known to their detractors as patent trolls.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/11/business/11legal.html?ref=business