Banks and credit card companies are outpacing tech giants in patent portfolio growth, with JPMorgan Chase, Capital One, and Bank of America each adding more than 1,200 active patent families as they race to lock down IP around machine learning, payments infrastructure, and fraud detection. Those are findings from data from IFI Claims.
In IFI Claims’ the S&P 100 snapshot, health related companies together control about 48,500 active patent families, or roughly 9% of the total. Most of that IP sitting with medical device and diversified health companies.
While both pharma and medtech firms rack up patents, their patent strategies reflect fundamentally different business models. Pure-play device makers like Medtronic stack thousands of patents around platforms, including in robotics, imaging systems and instruments, much like software companies. Each product may be covered by dozens or hundreds of patents protecting incremental improvements.
Drug makers operate differently. They build narrow, deep estates around blockbuster molecules, typically relying on regulatory exclusivity periods and manufacturing know-how that don’t appear in patent family counts. A single successful drug might generate $10 billion annually while protected by just a handful of patent families.
Johnson & Johnson’s 13,000-plus patent families reflect both strategies. A large medtech footprint from surgical robotics and orthopedic devices, plus a pharma portfolio around drugs like Stelara and Darzalex. Abbott and Thermo Fisher round out the device-heavy players with roughly 8,600 families between them.
Among pure-play pharma companies, Eli Lilly and Amgen expanded their active estates by low double digits, while Pfizer, Merck, Bristol Myers Squibb, and AbbVie all show net declines as patents expire.
Wall Street is betting on machine learning, payments and collateral IP
The fastest percentage growers in IFI’s S&P 100 list are financial firms. BlackRock nearly doubles its active patent family count, although from a small base. Right behind are JPMorgan Chase, UnitedHealth and Capital One. Several large banks also stand out on absolute gains. In the period IFI tracks, Bank of America added about 1,366 active families, Capital One added 1,236, and JPMorgan added 1,379, putting all three in the top ten risers by raw numbers.
IFI’ notes that many of JPMorgan’s patents are held as collateral or in an administrative capacity rather than as home grown inventions. A sample of its recent patents shows that a majority represent “some sort of collateral reassignment as opposed to organic invention.” The portfolio is still a useful signal, however, about where corporate value sits and which technologies underpin that value.
Capital One’s patents lean heavily toward machine learning, contactless payments, authentication, and cryptography. These are exactly the areas you would expect an industry built on real time, software defined money to invest in. A recent IFI analysis of artificial intelligence patents placed Capital One in the same frontier group as IBM, Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia on some AI dimensions.
Bank of America also promotes a culture of invention among employees, with thousands of named inventors across dozens of countries and U.S. states. According to company statements, roughly 17% of its patent portfolio centers on AI and machine learning, with cryptographic arrangements and attack signature detection also prominent.
Consumer brands in the IP game
IFI’s ranking also reinforces the fact that many household brands now behave like software and logistics companies when you look at their patent portfolios.
Nike added more than 1,600 active families in the period IFI tracks, placing it fifth by absolute gains behind RTX, Amazon, Apple, and Qualcomm. A visible slice of that growth is tied to digital assets and blockchain linked “CryptoKicks,” where physical products are mirrored by tokenized digital counterparts.
Starbucks, while still small in absolute terms, nearly doubled its active families to 180. Recent patents focus on coordinating in store computing devices, smart dispensers, freezer bins that can sense fill levels, and RFID based inventory systems. Walmart and Home Depot are also expanding portfolios that underpin omnichannel retail, data driven merchandising and in store automation.
Newcomers bring AI, workflows, and surgical robots into the S&P 100 patent mix
Recent entrants such as Palantir, ServiceNow, Intuitive Surgical, Intuit and Uber together hold about 5,500 active patent families. Palantir’s portfolio centers on interactive data analysis and geospatial mapping. ServiceNow patents workflow orchestration, management of data switching networks, and natural language interfaces. Intuit concentrates its IP on machine learning driven tax and finance software. Uber’s principal technologies sit at the intersection of location, ride sharing, and aerial mobility. Intuitive Surgical brings a dense cluster of surgical robotics and leader follower robot patents into the index.
While none of these portfolios rivals IBM or Qualcomm in raw size, they do, however, sit close to the digital plumbing that many other S&P 100 companies depend on.
