The quiet Bank of America lifer behind 370+ of the bank's patents
If you want to work in banking and become a patented inventor, you probably want to work at Bank of America. BofA has grown its patent portfolio astronomically, seeing a 70% total increase in the last five years, and a 94% increase in patents associated with AI and machine learning. According to Justia, a legal information retrieval site, the bank has obtained 880 patents in 2024 alone, but what are they all?
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Patents can sometimes take years to be granted, but 48 of its 2024 patents were initially filed in 2024. One of these patents involves using biometric authentication to provide behavioral analysis for its employees, tracking data such as how frequently they reset their passwords. There is also a patent for a "three-dimensional code review engine", which leverages augmented reality to help engineers visualize changes to a code base. Another patent has been experimenting with 'adversarial learning,' a method of training AI models where you actively provide deceptive prompts in an attempt to get the model to detect them.
It has plenty of people working on these patents, but one stands out. Manu Kurian is a lifer at the bank and has worked there since 2006. In that time, he has accrued a staggering 371 patents. Of those, 31 have been issued in 2024. A particular area of interest for Kurian appears to be non-fungible tokens (NFTs). They may be a (very) contentious topic in the consumer space, but Kurian is using them for advanced authentication processes and dynamic resource tracking. Almost a third of Kurian's 2024 patents involve the technology. Kurian's recent patents that leverage machine learning include a component-level detection system for software applications, and a task data compartmentalization and classification system for machine learning models.
Rather than being in New York, Kurian has spent the last decade in Texas, and eight years before that in Missouri. Joe Castinado, another inventor with 28 patents in 2024 according to Justia, has spent fifteen years based out of Denver, Colorado. Charlotte-based Brandon Sloane, who left for Meta back in 2022, is also an inventor on 28 of BofA's 2024 patents.
Kurian has previously sung BofA's praises around the "ease of the process" for publishing patents. He says the bank has a dedicated intellectual property team that files the patent for him after he writes the ideas out on paper. One of the team's most senior members is Matthew Hayenga, an assistant general counsel and SVP for intellectual property, who joined in 2022.
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