Fintech companies must also be actively protected. An intellectual property strategy for the development and deployment of FinTech will overlay intellectual property rights to protect different aspects of FinTech. Companies can clearly define and protect their intellectual property with records and documentation. Clear agreements on intellectual property rights should be established between third parties.
Fintech companies are strongly encouraged to invest in the reputation of their brands, as they guarantee a high quality of customer service. A strong trademark allows Fintech companies to differentiate their products from those of their competitors. Considering that Fintech companies often manage crucial financial assets, a recognizable brand (brand) can be particularly important to their customers. In the competitive world of FinTech, it is essential to develop an effective intellectual property (IP) strategy right from the start.
We have developed the Hogan Lovells IP FinTech Guide to help you with key questions regarding this essential consideration in the UK. There are four main issues that need to be considered when developing an effective intellectual property strategy for FinTech. Identify and protect your relevant IP, exploit the value of anything you believe, prevent infringement of third party rights and challenge infringement by third parties. The adoption of innovations reduces barriers to entry into the market by traditional operators, such as tech giants and startups, and increases their bargaining power as new substitute financial service providers, so secured intellectual property rights (“IPR”) serve to strengthen the position and bargaining power by ensuring the inventive characteristics of their products and providing them with a legal monopoly to exploit them.
Financial institutions and technology companies in the FinTech space can sometimes compete and form alliances at other times. Not all FinTech innovations may be eligible for patent protection, as this would depend on the nature of the innovation and the specific patentability requirements in the countries where protection is sought. It is important that owners of FinTech innovation maintain the confidentiality of their innovations until a patent application is prepared and filed with a patent office that establishes a priority right for the invention. In addition, since fintech systems must be able to interact with other third party fintech systems, broader agreements may be required to allow interoperability.
In cases where FinTech companies are preparing patent applications covering their latest innovations, a detailed review of guidance and case law is required. In fact, large institutions may be making significant investments, improving or replacing legacy technology systems with new FinTech innovations ranging from payments, blockchain, lending, regulation, compliance and auditing. A financial institution should consider early in the development stage whether its fintech will carry the brand and who will face that brand. Intellectual property disputes related to FinTech can occur in several contexts, including intellectual property disputes, intellectual property infringement and contractual disputes in the framework of development, licensing and marketing of FinTech products.
Since FinTech companies are often managers of important financial assets and documentation, a reputable brand can be of utmost importance to customers. The application of these criteria and their threshold varies from country to country, making some countries more friendly to the patentability of FinTech innovations than others. In FinTech innovations, inventions are largely related to computer-implemented processes, which revolve around technical actions executed by a computer, as well as related systems and devices configured to execute computer-implemented processes. Companies in the Fintech sector must provide adequate protection for the work of programmers, since they can inadvertently and without permission use third-party source codes in their work, which can have an adverse effect on technology ownership and the organization's freedom of operation.
The protection of trade secrets can pose some complexity for joint collaborations with other entities and the integration of protected information into other Fintech innovations, since the exchange of such information can be critical or risky for the legal rights owner. Laws regarding the eligibility of innovations related to software and financial processes have been constantly changing over the past decade, and there has been a shift towards more friendly regimes that favor the patentability of FinTech innovations (i.e., in the United States, which has been more conservative over the years previous). . .
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