Mitek Systems, Inc. (OTC:MITK.OB.ob) said today that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted the company four new patents for its popular Mobile Deposit® technology, including two issued within the past two weeks.
Capitalizing on its years of experience and intellectual property for detecting and capturing key data needed from paper checks and other documents, Mitek launched Mobile Deposit as a breakthrough mobile remote deposit capture (RDC) platform. Its initial patent for Mobile Deposit was granted in August 2010.
Now, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued Mitek patent Nos. 7,949,176 on May 24, and 7,953,268 on May 31. The Patent Office has notified the company of its acceptance of two additional patents, for which numbers are expected to be issued soon.
"We're very pleased to receive the additional patents on our image-analysis and recognition processes that distinguish Mobile Deposit from any other mobile-banking capability," said Mitek President and CEO James DeBello. "We also have applied for patents on our Mobile Photo Bill Pay™ technology, and we intend to seek additional intellectual property protection for capabilities that we roll out in industries other than financial services."
The new patents add texture to the original patented process and broaden Mitek's protection for Mobile Deposit, which has become the "Gold Standard" in enabling check deposits via camera-equipped smartphones and other mobile devices. To "Point, Shoot and Deposit™" with Mitek, users simply position their paper checks within the viewfinders of smartphones such as iPhone, BlackBerry and Google Android devices.
Mobile Deposit is now being deployed by dozens of banks - including five of the top 10 retail banks in the United States -- credit unions, brokerages and cash-management organizations.
DeBello noted a new market research report by Javelin Strategy & Research that found one in every four consumers and one in every two mobile-banking customers prefer to deposit checks using their smartphones to avoid visiting bank branches or ATMs. For financial institutions, benefits to adopting mobile RDC include lower transaction-processing costs and increased fee income, th income, the report said.
The Javelin report, entitled "2011 Mobile Remote Deposit Capture: Creating a Compelling Business Case for Mobile Servicing," was issued late last month. It was based on three waves of interviews and online surveys conducted last summer, last fall and early this year among a total of 13,000 respondents.
Mitek's Mobile Deposit is highly secure, accurate and easy-to-use technology that enables users to initiate mobile-deposit sessions, key in deposit amounts and simply snap photos of both sides of the checks with their smartphone cameras. Mitek software captures the check images, converts the images to digital data and transmits the data to the financial institution's receiving RDC solution in the required format.
Mobile Deposit is usually distributed on a "white label" basis by leading technology solutions integrators and applications services providers that deliver technology bundles to banks, credit unions and others in the financial services industry.
These include NCR; BankServ (formerly NetDeposit); RDM Corporation; 3i-Infotech (formerly J&B Software); Fiserv; Jack Henry & Associates; FIS; Wausau Financial Systems; CheckAlt Payment Solutions (formerly Skyline's DirectFED); Secure Payment Systems, Bluepoint Solutions; VSoft and Ensenta. In addition, Mitek has agreements with mobile-banking vendors Clairmail, mFoundry and Monitise Americas™.
DeBello said some distribution partners have turned to Mitek after trying unsuccessfully to work with other vendors to develop their own mobile RDC applications and recognizing that Mitek's extensive portfolio of intellectual property in mobile RDC and superior customer experience offered them a better way to go.