North Texas’ financial innovation strength was on display in patent awards the week of Oct. 13. 

Five banks and financial services companies received a combined 24 patents with local inventors. That’s nearly 14% of the region’s 178 grants and more than double the recent pace.

Over the past 12 weeks, financial services companies averaged 11 North Texas patents a week, according to an analysis of Dallas Innovates’ weekly patent explorer.

Two companies drove most of the increase. Bank of America, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, received 10 patents with North Texas inventors. Capital One, based in McLean, Virginia, had seven. New York-based Citibank and San Antonio-based USAA each had three, and San Francisco-based Wells Fargo had one. All five companies have large North Texas workforces.

The inventions include:

• A chatbot system that transfers chats it can’t answer to a human agent (Bank of America)
• A graphical user interface to make group payments easier (Capital One)
• Data encryption systems and methods (Citibank)
• A system that detects fraud based on tips added to transactions (USAA)
• Cybersecurity data products (Wells Fargo)

Other patents the week of Oct. 13

North Texas ranked tenth among 250 U.S. metropolitan areas for patent activity the week of Oct. 13, with 178 patents tied to the region. Of those, 38 had both a local inventor and assignee.

Texas Instruments (Dallas) received 19 patents, the most of any local company. The cross-boarder ecommerce company Crossian (Irving) was the second-most prolific with 11 design patents for pants.

Other notable awards include:

Dallas investor Mark Cuban and ZuMedia’s (New York) co-founders, Phyllis Jager and Barry Terach, received a patent for their ornamental design of an automobile grille and lights. The application took 515 days and follows a set of three automotive-related inventions the group patented in June.

Giga Energy (Houston) received a patent for a modular data center inside a shipping container. Co-founder and CEO Matthew Lohstroh of Plano is listed as a co-inventor. The company has manufacturing facilities in Houston and Long Beach, California. 

Beauty company Mary Kay (Addison) received a patent for an instant-effect eye cream. The company has a long history of investing in product research and development as well as new technologies to support its independent sales force.

Nvidia (Santa Clara, California) received two patents with North Texas co-inventors. One covers circadian rhythm-based data augmentation to detect drowsiness in vehicle drivers. Shelly Goel of Irving was one of its five inventors. The other covers a tank-based, dual-mode data center cooling system. Pardeep Shahi of Arlington was one of two inventors.

Reddy Ice (Dallas) received a patent for a bagged ice dispenser designed to use storage space more efficiently than traditional dispensers. Its inventor, Henrik Pape, is based in Denmark.

Patent information is provided by Joe Chiarella, founder of patent analytics company Patent Index and publisher of The Inventiveness Index. For additional details on the patents granted below, search the USPTO Patent Full-Text and Image Database.