DETAILED ACTION
1. The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA . This Office action is in response to Applicant’s communication filed on September 10, 2025. Cancellation of claim 7, addition of new claim 21 and amendments to claims 1, 15 and 20 have been entered. Claims 1-6 and 8-21 are pending and have been examined. The statement of reasons for the indication of allowable subject matter over prior art was already discussed in the Office action mailed on April 11, 2025 and hence not repeated here. The rejections and response to arguments are stated below.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 101
2. 35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
3. Claims 1-6 and 8-21 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 101 because the claimed invention is directed to an abstract idea without significantly more.
The claim(s) recite(s) presentation of financial offers for financial service or product within a financial services platform, which is considered a judicial exception because it falls under the category of “Certain Methods of organizing human activity” such as fundamental economic practice as well as commercial or legal interactions including agreements, legal obligations; advertising, marketing or sales activities or behaviors; business relations as discussed below. This judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application as discussed below. The claim(s) does/do not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception as discussed below.
Analysis
Step 1: In the instant case, exemplary claim 1 is directed to a method.
Step 2A – Prong One: The limitations of “using an application programming interface, periodically extracting via an extraction module operating on a computing device, unstructured data from one or more external online sources associated with a user, wherein the user is one of: a new user of a financial services platform, or an existing user of the financial services platform, and wherein the external source is a social media account and/or an online repository having user-generated or third-party generated content;
analysing the extracted unstructured data and structuring the unstructured data by normalizing and categorizing the unstructured data within a standardized data format;
generating or updating a user profile from the unstructured data, the user profile comprising a user risk assessment;
presenting, to the user, via a presentation module operating on the computing device, a financial offer for a financial service or product;
upon receiving an indication of interest from the user, matching, based on the user profile and the user risk assessment, the user to one or more pieces of invitational content each associated with a brand and corresponding to a product or service offer from the brand;
presenting the one or more matching pieces of invitational content to the user;
upon receiving indication that the user has accepted the product or service offer for one of the pieces of invitational content, receiving a fee from the brand, wherein at least a portion of the fee from the brand is used to fund one or more aspects of the financial service or product; and
periodically performing one or more of the above steps for additional financial offers and additional pieces of invitational content and interactively prompting the user via a conversation-based generative artificial intelligence model with the additional financial offers and the additional pieces of invitational content” as drafted, when considered collectively as an ordered combination without the italicized portions, is a process that, under the broadest reasonable interpretation, covers the category of “Certain Methods of organizing human activity” such as fundamental economic practice as well as commercial or legal interactions including agreements, legal obligations; advertising, marketing or sales activities or behaviors; business relations.
Provision/presentation of financial services within a financial services platform is a fundamental economic practice such as providing financial services.
The steps of “presenting, to the user, a financial offer for a financial service or product; upon receiving an indication of interest from the user, matching, based on the user profile and the user risk assessment, the user to one or more pieces of invitational content each associated with a brand and corresponding to a product or service offer from the brand; presenting the one or more matching pieces of invitational content to the user; upon receiving indication that the user has accepted the product or service offer for one of the pieces of invitational content, receiving a fee from the brand, wherein at least a portion of the fee from the brand is used to fund one or more aspects of the financial service or product; and periodically performing one or more of the above steps for additional financial offers and additional pieces of invitational content and interactively prompting the user via a conversation-based generative artificial intelligence model with the additional financial offers and the additional pieces of invitational content” considered collectively as an ordered combination, is a form of commercial or legal interactions including agreements, legal obligations; advertising, marketing or sales activities or behaviors. Hence, the steps of the claim, considered collectively as an ordered combination without the italicized portions, covers the abstract category of “Certain Methods of organizing human activity”.
That is, other than, an application programming interface, an extraction module operating on a computing device, a financial services platform, and one or more external online sources comprising a social media account and/or an online repository, a presentation module operating on the computing device, a conversation-based generative artificial intelligence model and one or more processors (not explicitly recited in claims 1-14), nothing in the claim precludes the steps from being performed as a method of organizing human activity. If the claim limitations, under the broadest reasonable interpretation, covers methods of organizing human activity but for the recitation of generic computer components, then it falls within the “Certain methods of organizing human activity” grouping of abstract ideas. Accordingly, the claim recites an abstract idea.
Step 2A – Prong Two: The judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application. In particular, the claim only recites the additional elements of an application programming interface, an extraction module operating on a computing device, a financial services platform, and one or more external online sources comprising a social media account and/or an online repository, a presentation module operating on the computing device, a conversation-based generative artificial intelligence model and one or more processors (not explicitly recited in claims 1-14) to perform all the steps. A plain reading of Figures 1-2 and 4 and associated descriptions in at least paragraphs [8], [11] - [12], [18] - [50], [65] and [97] reveals that the application programming interface, the extraction module and the presentation module operating on a computing device and the conversation-based generative artificial intelligence model may be broadly interpreted to comprise suitably programmed generic computer components to perform their respective functions. The one or more external online sources comprising a social media account and/or an online repository are broadly interpreted to comprise data sources suitably programmed to provide the corresponding data. The financial services platform may be a suitably programmed generic financial services platform. The one or more processors (not explicitly recited in claims 1-14) may be generic processors suitably programmed to perform the associated functions. Hence, the additional elements in the claims are all generic components suitably programmed to perform their respective functions. The additional elements in all the steps are recited at a high-level of generality (i.e., as generic computer components performing generic computer functions) such that it amounts no more than mere instructions to apply the exception using generic computer components. Accordingly, these additional elements do not integrate the abstract idea into a practical application because they do not impose any meaningful limits on practicing the abstract idea. Hence, claim 1 is directed to an abstract idea.
Step 2B: The claim does not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception. As discussed above with respect to integration of the abstract idea into a practical application, using the additional elements (identified above) to perform the claimed steps amounts to no more than mere instructions to apply the exception using a generic computer component. The additional elements of the instant underlying process, when taken in combination, together do not offer substantially more than the sum of the functions of the elements when each is taken alone. Mere instructions to apply an exception using a generic computer component cannot provide an inventive concept. Hence, independent claim 1 is not patent eligible. Independent claims 15 and 20 are also not patent eligible based on similar reasoning and rationale.
Dependent claims 2-6, 8-14, 16-19 and 21when analyzed as a whole are held to be patent ineligible under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the additional recited limitations only refine the abstract idea further.
For instance, in claims 2-5, the steps “wherein the data from the external sources comprise one or more of: financial transaction data and social media engagement data”,
“wherein the data from the external sources is retrieved and presented by a third party service”,
“wherein generating the user profile comprises structuring the unstructured data to be normalized within a format for user profiles” and
” further comprising: authenticating the user within the financial services platform”
under the broadest reasonable interpretation, are further refinements of methods of organizing human activity because these steps describe data and the intermediate steps of the underlying process.
In claim 6, the steps “further comprising: interactively prompting the user to provide one or more pieces of information missing from the user profile” under the broadest reasonable interpretation, are further refinements of methods of organizing human activity because these steps describe the intermediate steps of the underlying process. The additional elements of interactively prompting has already been addressed in the analysis of claim 1.
In claims 8-9, the steps “wherein one or more AI models associated with the matching of the user with invitational content and the presenting of financial offers to the user learn and improve understanding of the user's preferences based on the acceptance of the financial offer from the user, such that the matching and presenting are more narrowly tailored to the user's interests” and
“determining, via one or more AI models, one or more user preferences or dislikes related to one or more of: invitational content to be matched with the user or financial offers to be presented to the user; and taking the preference or dislike into account during matching of the user to invitational content or presenting of financial offers to the user, wherein the determining is based on the extracted unstructured data”
under the broadest reasonable interpretation, are further refinements of methods of organizing human activity because these steps describe the intermediate steps of the underlying process.
In claims 10-12, the steps “further comprising: upon receiving the fee from the brand, provisioning the financial service or product to the user”,
“wherein generating the user profile comprises using natural language processing techniques to analyze text from the extracted unstructured data”,
“wherein the user profile comprises one or more of: demographic information, interests, and preferences inferred from the extracted unstructured data”
under the broadest reasonable interpretation, are further refinements of methods of organizing human activity because these steps describe the intermediate steps of the underlying process. The additional elements of natural language processing techniques are broadly interpreted to correspond to generic software suitably programmed to perform the associated functions. The additional elements of the natural language processing techniques, perform their traditional functions recited at a high-level of generality such that it amounts no more than mere instructions to apply the exception using generic computer components.
In claims 13-14, the steps “wherein performing the user risk assessment comprises analyzing user financial activity data from the user profile, the user financial activity data comprising one or more of: transaction history, spending patterns, and income sources from one or more financial accounts of the user’ and
“wherein the user risk assessment comprises a credit history of the user” under the broadest reasonable interpretation, are further refinements of methods of organizing human activity because these steps describe the data and the intermediate steps of the underlying process.
In claims 16-19, the steps “wherein presenting the financial offer to the user comprises offering one or more of: a credit limit increase, a cashback reward, or a tailored financial product”,
“wherein matching the user to one or more pieces of invitational content is performed via one or more Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for an ad network associated with the brand”,
“wherein the one or more processors are further configured to perform the operation of: monitoring the user's engagement with the presented financial offers and adjusting the user profile accordingly” and
“wherein the user profile is continuously or periodically updated based on changes in one or more of: the user's financial activity data and social media engagement data”
under the broadest reasonable interpretation, are further refinements of methods of organizing human activity because these steps describe the intermediate steps of the underlying process. The additional elements of one or more Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for an ad network are broadly interpreted to correspond to generic software suitably programmed to perform the associated functions. The additional elements of the one or more Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for an ad network, perform their traditional functions recited at a high-level of generality such that it amounts no more than mere instructions to apply the exception using generic computer components.
In claim 21, the steps “further comprising:
training an artificial intelligence model for unstructured data extraction, wherein the trained model performs the analysing the extracted unstructured data and structuring the unstructured data by normalizing and categorizing the unstructured data within a standardized data format;
periodically extracting, via the extraction module operating on the computing device, additional unstructured data from the one or more external online sources associated with the user; and
updating the user profile with structured data generated by the trained artificial intelligence model, wherein the unstructured data is dissected, and elements of the unstructured data are categorized into attributes or fields that align with components of the user profile” under the broadest reasonable interpretation, are further refinements of methods of organizing human activity because these steps describe the intermediate steps of the underlying process. The additional elements of the artificial intelligence model, the trained model, the extraction module operating on the computing device, and the one or more external online sources associated with the user have already been discussed in the in the analysis of claim 1. These additional elements perform their traditional functions recited at a high-level of generality such that it amounts no more than mere instructions to apply the exception using generic computer components.
In all the dependent claims, the judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application because the limitations are recited at a high-level of generality such that it amounts no more than mere instructions to apply the exception using generic computer components. Also, the claims do not affect an improvement to another technology or technical field; the claims do not amount to an improvement to the functioning of a computer system itself; the claims do not affect a transformation or reduction of a particular article to a different state or thing; and the claims do not move beyond a general link of the use of an abstract idea to a particular technological environment. In addition, the dependent claims do not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception. The additional elements of the instant underlying process, when taken in combination, together do not offer substantially more than the sum of the functions of the elements when each is taken alone. The claims as a whole, do not amount to significantly more than the abstract idea itself. For these reasons, the dependent claims also are not patent eligible.
Response to Arguments
4. In response to Applicants arguments on pages 10-12 of the Applicant’s remarks that the claims are patent-eligible under 35 USC 101 when considered under MPEP 2106, the Examiner respectfully disagrees.
The fact that the claims are Patent-Ineligible when considered under the MPEP 2106 has already been addressed in the rejection and hence not all the details of the rejection are repeated here.
Response to Applicants’ arguments regarding Step 2A – Prong one:
The claim(s) recite(s) presentation of financial offers for financial service or product within a financial services platform, which is considered a judicial exception because it falls under the category of “Certain Methods of organizing human activity” such as fundamental economic practice as well as commercial or legal interactions including agreements, legal obligations; advertising, marketing or sales activities or behaviors; business relations as discussed in the rejection.
Provision/presentation of financial services within a financial services platform is a fundamental economic practice such as providing financial services.
The steps of “presenting, to the user, a financial offer for a financial service or product; upon receiving an indication of interest from the user, matching, based on the user profile and the user risk assessment, the user to one or more pieces of invitational content each associated with a brand and corresponding to a product or service offer from the brand; presenting the one or more matching pieces of invitational content to the user; upon receiving indication that the user has accepted the product or service offer for one of the pieces of invitational content, receiving a fee from the brand, wherein at least a portion of the fee from the brand is used to fund one or more aspects of the financial service or product; and periodically performing one or more of the above steps for additional financial offers and additional pieces of invitational content and interactively prompting the user via a conversation-based generative artificial intelligence model with the additional financial offers and the additional pieces of invitational content” considered collectively as an ordered combination, is a form of commercial or legal interactions including agreements, legal obligations; advertising, marketing or sales activities or behaviors. Hence, the steps of the claim, considered collectively as an ordered combination without the italicized portions, covers the abstract category of “Certain Methods of organizing human activity”. Therefore the Applicant’s arguments are not persuasive.
Response to Applicants’ arguments regarding Step 2A – Prong two:
According to MPEP 2106, limitations that are indicative of integration into a practical application include:
Improvements to the functioning of a computer, or to any other technology or technical field - see MPEP 2106.05(a)
Applying or using a judicial exception to effect a particular treatment or prophylaxis for a disease or medical condition
Applying the judicial exception with, or by use of, a particular machine - see MPEP 2106.05(b)
Effecting a transformation or reduction of a particular article to a different state or thing - see MPEP 2106.05(c)
Applying or using the judicial exception in some other meaningful way beyond generally linking the use of the judicial exception to a particular technological environment, such that the claim as a whole is more than a drafting effort designed to monopolize the exception - see MPEP 2106.05(e).
In the instant case, the judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application, because none of the above criteria is met. The additional elements in the claims (exemplary claim 1) are an application programming interface, an extraction module operating on a computing device, a financial services platform, and one or more external online sources comprising a social media account and/or an online repository, a presentation module operating on the computing device, a conversation-based generative artificial intelligence model and one or more processors (not explicitly recited in claims 1-14) to perform all the steps. A plain reading of Figures 1-2 and 4 and associated descriptions in at least paragraphs [8], [11] - [12], [18] - [50], [65] and [97] reveals that the application programming interface, the extraction module and the presentation module operating on a computing device and the conversation-based generative artificial intelligence model may be broadly interpreted to comprise suitably programmed generic computer components to perform their respective functions. The one or more external online sources comprising a social media account and/or an online repository are broadly interpreted to comprise data sources suitably programmed to provide the corresponding data. The financial services platform may be a suitably programmed generic financial services platform. The one or more processors (not explicitly recited in claims 1-14) may be generic processors suitably programmed to perform the associated functions. Hence, the additional elements in the claims are all generic components suitably programmed to perform their respective functions. The additional elements in all the steps are recited at a high-level of generality (i.e., as generic computer components performing generic computer functions) such that it amounts no more than mere instructions to apply the exception using generic computer components. Accordingly, these additional elements do not integrate the abstract idea into a practical application because they do not impose any meaningful limits on practicing the abstract idea. Hence, the claims (exemplary claim 1) are directed to an abstract idea.
The claimed features including those recited on pages 9-10 of the remarks may at best be characterized as an improvement in the abstract idea of presentation of financial offers for financial service or product within a financial services platform, using the additional elements as tools in their normal capacity. The additional elements (identified in the rejection) are generic computer components used to apply the abstract idea.
The alleged advantages such as “structuring the data reduces the amount of the source unstructured data that has to be stored…… providing optimization of the process such that the original extracted data is in a usable form” are due to improvements in the abstract idea of presentation of financial offers for financial service or product within a financial services platform, using the additional elements as tools in their normal capacity. An improvement in abstract idea is still abstract (SAP America v. Investpic *2-3 (“We may assume that the techniques claimed are “groundbreaking, innovative, or even brilliant,” but that is not enough for eligibility. Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., 569 U.S. 576, 591 (2013); accord buySAFE, Inc. v. Google, Inc., 765 F.3d 1350, 1352 (Fed. Cir. 2014). Nor is it enough for subject-matter eligibility that claimed techniques be novel and nonobvious in light of prior art, passing muster under 35 U.S.C. §§ 102 and 103. See Mayo Collaborative Servs. v. Prometheus Labs., Inc., 566 U.S. 66, 89–90 (2012); Synopsys, Inc. v. Mentor Graphics Corp., 839 F.3d 1138, 1151 (Fed. Cir. 2016) (“A claim for a new abstract idea is still an abstract idea).
The additional elements (identified in the rejection) are generic computer components used to apply the abstract idea. It does not involve any improvements to another technology, technical field, or improvements to the functioning of the computer itself. Therefore, Applicants’ arguments are not persuasive.
For these reasons and those discussed in the rejection, the rejections under 35 USC § 101 are maintained.
Conclusion
5. The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure:
(a) Chen; Jason et al. (US Pub. 2023/0394459 A1) discloses an electronic device that may invoke a host application. The device may display a first host user interface on the display, the first host user interface including a first host user interface component associated with a child application. In response, the device may invoke, using the host application, the child application executed at the electronic device. The device may transmit, using the host application, a request for data associated with a child user interface component to the child application. The device may transmit, using the child application, the request for data associated with the child user interface component to a child application server, wherein the data associated with the child user interface component is inaccessible by the host application. The device may receive, using the child application, the data associated with the child user interface component from the child application server. The device may display the child user interface component.
6. Applicant's amendment necessitated the new ground(s) of rejection presented in this Office action. Accordingly, THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. See MPEP § 706.07(a). Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any extension fee pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the date of this final action.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the Examiner should be directed to Narayanswamy Subramanian whose telephone number is (571) 272-6751. The examiner can normally be reached Monday-Friday from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner's supervisor, Abhishek Vyas can be reached at (571) 270-1836. The fax number for Formal or Official faxes and Draft to the Patent Office is (571) 273-8300.
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/Narayanswamy Subramanian/
Primary Examiner
Art Unit 3691
September 27, 2025