WASHINGTON – A federal appeals court Friday issued a ruling upholding a lower court decision to dismiss MShift’s claim of patent infringement against Intuit and several credit unions and banks for mobile banking technology used by hundreds of Intuit’s financial institution clients.
The ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit comes a week after Intuit agreed to acquire the mobile banking assets of the disputed technology from Mobile Money Ventures, a joint venture between Citigroup and South Korea Telecom, clearing the way for wider use of the service.
MShift, which had licensed the technology to Digital Insight, since acquired by Intuit, had filed suit in February 2010 claiming the Mobile Money technology infringed on its patent allowing smart phones and other mobile devices to access network sites by means of an adaption or conversion engine, which translates between the language of the network site (like HTML) and the language of the mobile device (HTML, HDML or WAP). The infringement claim was subsequently dismissed by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Among the defendants in the patent infringement case are: Meritrust CU, Professional FCU, Fort Worth Community CU, USE CU, as well as Community Trust Bank, Sanford Institution for Savings, Gate City Bank, Busey Bank, Denison State Bank, Fidelity Bank, Internet Bank of Indiana and Vision Bank.
The MShift technology was popular among early credit union providers of mobile banking, with Patelco CU and The Golden 1 CU among the first customers, and Alliance CU, Visions FCU, Bank-Fund Staff FCU, Digital FCU and Xceed FCU, contracting later through MShift's relationship with Digital Insight, which was acquired by Intuit in 2007.
