Patenting financial innovation in Europe

Subject matter of financial and business methods is of questionable patentability in the European patent system. European Patent Office (EPO) adopted a ‘no search’ policy to counter a surge in applications clearly considered non-technical and method based. These applications are thus characterized by high refusal rates and low grant rates. Our evidence suggests that financial method patents have the lowest grant rate (only about 3%) among other business method inventions. We also observed a large number of pending applications. Not only are pending patents valuable, they may represent applications that are difficult to evaluate owing to the unclear picture related to their patentability. In this paper, we study the patent characteristics of pending applications along with successful and unsuccessful applications. The study offers a patent landscape related to financial innovation. It then compares early stage patent characteristics that could have an influence on the outcome of applications.