Federal Circuit calls credit reporting patent the "height of abstraction"

In a recent decision, the Federal Circuit continued to raise high eligibility hurdles for fintech software patents inventions. In Clarilogic, Inc. v. FormFree Holdings Corp. (Fed. Cir. Mar. 15, 2017), the court addressed the eligibility of U.S. Patent 8,762,243, which was directed to methods for electronic account certification and  credit reporting. The representative claim of the patent was:

1. A computer-implemented method for providing certified financial data indicating financial risk about an individual, comprising:
(a) receiving a request for the certified financial data;
(b) electronically collecting financial account data about the individual from at least one financial source,
(c) transforming the financial account data into a desired format;
(d) validating the financial account data by applying an algorithm engine to the financial account data to identify exceptions, wherein the exceptions indicate incorrect data or financial risk;
(e) confirming the exceptions by collecting additional data and applying the algorithm engine to the additional data,
(f) marking the exceptions as valid exceptions when output of the algorithm engine validates the exceptions; and
(g) generating, using a computer, a report from the financial account data and the valid exceptions,
wherein the financial account data comprises at least one of real-time transaction data, real time balance data, historical transaction data, or historical balance data; and the algorithm engine identifies a pattern of financial risk; the method is computer implemented, and steps (c), (e), and (f) are executed via the computer or a series of computers.

The court found the claim to be directed to the abstract idea of "gathering financial information of potential borrowers." The court also found that the patent failed to claim significantly more than the abstract idea:  "claim 1 recites a method that changes the way electronic information is displayed via an unknown and unclaimed process. Absent any limitation to how the data are changed, there is little, if any, transformative effect. Data are still data." The court also stated that "the claims require only off-the-shelf, conventional computer technology for gathering, analyzing, and displaying the desired information.... The ’243 patent does not claim the technical manner in which financial data is gathered, analyzed, or output. It does not claim any proprietary risk-assessment algorithm."

Concluding that the representative claim was ineligible, the court stated that "a method for collection, analysis, and generation of information reports, where the claims are not limited to how the collected information is analyzed or reformed, is the height of abstraction."