The Canadian Intellectual Property Office has issued Smart Chip Technologies with patent no. 2182596, entitled 'Method and System for Allocating and Redeeming Incentive Credits between a Portable Device and a Base Device', which is an expanded version of the firm's existing patents owned in the USA, Mexico, Australia, and Japan.
The SCTN patents cover the business process of allocating, storing, and redeeming any type of loyalty, rewards, or incentives between devices such as smart cards, mobile phones, merchant point-of-sale terminals, ATMs, PCs, satellites, or mainframe computers.
"We are delighted to have the broad business process patent finally issued in the Canadian market, which has higher adoption rates of smart cards and advanced chip technologies than the US market," said Joseph Diamond, SCTN's senior vice president of finance and administration. "This strengthens our Canadian product offering and creates an additional revenue stream through patent licensing."
According to Diamond, the patents acquired so far are key to the firm's end-to-end loyalty programme management solution that complies with EMV (Europay, MasterCard, Visa), Global Platform, and MULTOS for electronic payment integration.
Because the system is compatible with bar code, magnetic-stripe, RFID, and smart cards, it offers a smooth migration path for banks and financial institutions that want to maintain existing rewards schemes during the upgrade to newer, secure, EMV-compliant smart cards. The loyalty system can also be integrated with CRM systems, linking with multi-application transit, gaming, entertainment, access, and campus cards.
"The patent not only adds value to our end-to-end loyalty solution but licensing it will also provide protection for our Canadian customers from other industry patents," said David Simon, chairman and chief product architect for SCTN.
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