In 2005, Bank of America began an advertising campaign. By enrolling in “Keep the Change,” every time you buy something with your debit card, the bank rounds up your purchase to the nearest dollar amount and transfers the difference from your checking to your savings account free of charge. Then, the ad explains that the bank will contribute the same amount to your Bank of America savings account, doubling the savings for a limited time. The last few words of the radio commercial and the web site are patent pending. What does Bank of America believe is new and patentable about this? Nobody knows exactly. It is patent pending. It is still a secret.
We do know that “rounding” was discovered and has been a part of math for many years. Most of us have used an ATM machine inside a retail stores to transfer money between accounts. If we looked hard enough, I bet we could find someone that liked to transfer money to keep only “rounded” amounts in their checking account, with all the change in the savings account.
So what could be new? Likely, there are no moving parts; nothing you could touch; maybe no computers or software. The invention could be nothing more than the marketing program. One real value of this system, and its related patent pending, is the value of gaining and retaining bank customers through marketing. When this patent issues, it may let Bank of America exclude other banks from marketing or advertising similar programs for up to 20 years.
In the fall of 2008, the law changed the standard for patentable subject matter. Now, there must be a transformation of an article or a concrete result. As far as I know, the Bank of America patent is still pending and still secret.
About Andrew P. Lahser, Attorney