Mitek Fights Back

Mitek has fired back against USAA's allegations that the San Diego-based capture ISV stole USAA's technology. According to a statement issued yesterday, "Mitek believes that the evidence will ultimately show that Mitek's engineers independently developed its Mobile Deposit software and related patents based on Mitek's own ideas. Far from concealing the facts from USAA, Mitek launched its Mobile Deposit product in January 2008 and repeatedly and openly made USAA aware of the product at multiple points during 2008 and afterwards. USAA launched its own mobile check deposit application utilizing Mitek's patented technology in or around August 2009, more than a year after Mitek, and long after it first learned about Mitek's product."

Basically, it boils down to this:
1. Somewhere around 2005, Mitek and USAA sign contract for USAA to license Mitek's CAR/LAR technology
2. Both Mitek and USAA say they then go to work independently developing capture technology utilizing mobile phones.
3. Mitek launches its Mobile Deposit SDK
4. USAA launches mobile check capture technology
5. Mitek starts asking USAA to pony up for patented technology the bank is using in its check capture application.
6. USAA says, "peshaw, you stole that technology from us" and turns around and sues Mitek, attempting to invalidate its patents.
7. Mitek says, "What are you talking about? We're going to fight this thing."

As we've said before, this is so important to our industry because Mitek has two patents related to full-page document capture that are among those being challenged by USAA.