Mobile payments and commerce platform Fintiv has slapped PayPal and Apple Pay with a lawsuit on allegations of patent infringement, according to Asia Financial and other reports on Wednesday (April 27). Fintiv filed a similar lawsuit against Walmart.
Fintiv accused PayPal of infringing five of its patents related to payments functionality, according to court documents. The litigation Fintiv brought against Walmart alleges that trade secrets were used inappropriately. The lawsuit also alleges that the retail giant infringed the same payment patent as PayPal, specifically, using phone technology to process payments.
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“These three cases are pretty significant for the tech community as a whole,” says Court Coursey, a director with Fintiv. “If you see one of these cases become a victory, I think you’ll see the rest become license deals pretty quickly.”
The complaint against PayPal was filed earlier this year and seeks damages, royalties and associated court and legal fees, plus interest.
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“We’re talking billions of dollars here,” Sol Saad, a Florida tech investment banker, told Asia Financial. His firms have advised Fintiv in the past. “This would include future royalties but also back payments for prior years of infringement.”
Apple, PayPal and Walmart did not respond to requests for comment.
“Fintiv has a strong patent portfolio of over 150 patents, in addition to a large number of patent continuations and patents pending,” Saad told Asia Financial. He explained that Mozido, Fintiv’s predecessor company, invented and patented the ideas necessary to create the mobile payments before the technology to actually power those ideas had been developed, and has followed up with subsequent patents as the technology to support them emerged.
Mozido, Fintiv’s predecessor company, founded a phone-based payment remittance business with Western Union and Radio Shack in early 2008.
Fintiv initially hit Apple with a lawsuit in December 2018. In October 2019, Apple filed a petition to look at the patents, Asia Financial reported. Apple was denied the patent review in May 2020. A trial was originally set for March 2021.
Now the trial is scheduled for June in United States District Court for the Western District of Texas in June 2022.
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