Bank of America is about to accelerate its pace of innovation
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Bank of America (BofA) announced that it earned a record 418 patents from the United States Patent Office last year, beating the 318 patents it earned in 2018, when it was the year’s top financial institution patent holder, according to the Intellectual Property Owners Association.
BofA’s overall patent portfolio now consists of over 3,900 patents and applications.
The bank has been working hard on some high-profile proprietary technology in the last few months, such as working with IBM to develop a public cloud for banks.
The forthcoming service will be tailored to the cloud computing needs of banks, with features like automated security tools and top-level encryption, in which data is converted into code to restrict unauthorized access. And given that many banks harbor concerns about data privacy and security when it comes to cloud adoption, a cloud designed in part by banks, for banks could quickly gain traction with financial institutions.
BofA has fleshed out its virtual assistant, Erica. Since its May 2018 launch, Erica has gained capabilities like alerting users about upcoming bills, and the assistant’s popularity is growing: It hit the 10 million user mark in December 2019.
And Erica can help inform the most advantageous upgrades to itself, as it gathers data on the requests each customer makes of it, informing the bank on the features customers want but that aren’t currently supported, said David Tyrie, BofA’s head of advanced solutions and digital banking, per Yahoo Finance. For example, the ability to show recurring charges and update the card information used to carry out those charges is a function rolling out to Erica in early 2020 because customers who had lost their credit or debit cards wanted it.
And BofA’s new patent numbers suggest that it is only going to accelerate its pace of innovation. While the 418 patents it earned in 2019 marked a 31% year-over-year (YoY) increase, the 318 patents BofA earned in 2018 marked only a 9% YoY growth. This is a significant acceleration, which suggests that 2020 could be a year in which BofA launches a bumper crop of new technologies and digital banking capabilities.
As the bank works to innovate, however, it should also be mindful of the risks of developing new tech in-house, namely that crafting proprietary tools takes time and resources, and that results are not always guaranteed. A sterling example is Chase’s digital-only bank Finn, which it ended up shuttering, citing poor adoption because of a failure to differentiate from its other options.
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