Bringing video biometrics to depositing checks gets patent protection

Some patents make you wonder how someone could have thought up an innovation. Some make you wonder: Nobody has patented this obvious idea before?

U.S. patent 11216884, issued this month to Andre Rene Buentello and assigned to the United Services Automobile Association (USAA), protects the idea of using video cameras, webcams or a video-enabled phone to deposit checks in a bank account. Mitek has been providing check deposits through OCR on photographs taken with mobile devices for years.

Instead of taking a still image of the front and back of a check, as is now common over much of the planet, a person would deposit a check using a live two-way video feed. The patent covers the use of biometric identifiers to authenticate the depositor’s identity as well as to endorse the check.

The same assignee, United Services Automobile Association, also had a patent filing published in 2021 for “Transaction management based on sensor data,” which may be biometrics, to assess a device user’s “physical, emotional and/or intellectual state.”

Potential biometrics gathered by a device such as a smartphone or wearable and used by the system would include face and voice print as well as a number of health patterns such as heart rate, oxygen levels, body temperature and even brain waves

The idea is to assess a person’s state of mind when trying to purchase goods and prevent or delay some transactions based on emotional recognition algorithms created to keep users from, for example, buying something while drunk or angry.

Article Topics

authentication  |  biometric identifiers  |  biometrics  |  identity verification  |  mobile biometrics  |  patents  |  research and development  |  secure transactions  |  USAA