T 0862/05 (Sales system/CITIBANK) 20-02-2008

Reasons for the Decision

1. The invention concerns an electronic sales and service support system intended for banks. According to the explanations in the patent application (p.2-7), marketing of financial services must be targeted to people who were inclined to make a change or open other accounts. To anticipate a customer's needs and support targeted marketing, a service provider had to know its customers. In an effort to deal with a large customer database, businesses traditionally maintained customer records. The database must be assembled from diverse sources and information be retrieved from the central database in a meaningful and practical way. However, most bank employees never learned how to use complex query languages. Instead, developers wrote custom applications that were used by the bank employees having only a limited understanding of the program. Thus, an employee's ability to use a database was often limited by the custom applications written by someone else. It was an object of the invention to provide an electronic sales and service support system that provided improved identification of sales targets using a centralized database.

Main request

2. The Board considers the technical features of claim 1 to be the following:

- a central database,

- means for inputting data into the central database,

- means for searching the database and identifying records,

- workstations with or without a graphic user interface,

- telecommunication links, and

- means for building structured queries.

2.1 The appellants do not deny that these features are known per se (cf also the description of the prior art as summarized above). They do however argue that the particular way the components are combined and interact was not known. It was a significant feature of claims 1 and 11 that electronic communication was used in the way specified by the claims. It resulted in a quicker generation and distribution of sales leads. The skilled person would not arrive at anything falling within the scope of claims 1 or 11.

2.2 Looking closer at the interactions invoked by the appellants, the Board notes that these are largely of a commercial or organisational nature. Sales leads - ie specific information about (potential) customers - are generated by a so-called micromarketing centre. The only thing claim 1 says about this micromarketing centre is that it contains workstations. The workstations are connected to a database, but this is clearly necessary since sales leads must be generated from some kind of starting data. There is a central customer information system also linked to the database, but the function of this system is not further defined in the claim and thus has no specified bearing on the generation and distribution of sales leads.

2.3 The appellants have argued that by using a central database and a central customer information system linked with the central database and linked for electronic communication to the work stations at the plurality of branch systems it is possible to reduce the time required to generate and distribute sales leads. Claim 1 however merely states that leads are distributed among selected bankers by "means", even leaving it open whether these means are technical. If they are understood as telecommunication lines, their choice was trivial.

2.4 Furthermore, the appellants have pointed out that according to the description, p.7, l.7-26, prior systems suffered from errors due to bank employees having to use predefined queries since they were not skilled at the task of forming queries. The only feature in claim 1 which might conceivably address this problem is the provision of a "micromarketing center" containing work stations. But work stations are used for forming queries in the described prior art as well, and merely referring to the location of the work station as a "micromarketing center" has no technical significance.

2.5 Finally, the appellants have insisted that the skilled person would not have arrived at anything falling within the scope of the claims. This is however not always a relevant argument with respect to a claim containing non-technical features. It was held in decision T 273/02 - IC card/TOSHIBA (not published in the OJ EPO) that the "could/would approach" only applies if the "would" part involves technical considerations. This is another way of saying that the ingenuity of a claim's non-technical features is of no relevance since only technical contributions may contribute to an inventive step. As for the claimed combination of technical features, the Board is convinced that the skilled person would indeed have arrived at it.

2.6 Thus the subject-matter of claim 1 does not involve an inventive step (Article 56 EPC 1973).

3. The same considerations apply to the system with which the method of claim 11 is to be used. The method features themselves are either of a non-technical nature (such as standardizing and householding, communicating a campaign or a concept, distributing and assigning leads to bankers) or, when implemented, arguably technical but well known (such as inputting data into the central database, building queries, generating a list, electronically distributing the list). Therefore, also the method of claim 11 does not involve an inventive step (Article 56 EPC 1973).

Auxiliary requests 1 and 2

4. Since these requests encompass claims 1 and 11, respectively, of the main request, they must also be refused (Article 56 EPC 1973).

Auxiliary request 3

5. Claim 1 additionally contains the following three features:

means for communicating a sales promotion concept to the micromarketing center;

means located at the micromarketing /center/ for generating leads based on the sales promotion concept;

and a system for automatically providing leads to the branch systems overnight.

The first means could be a conventional telecommunication line. The second means are indistinguishable from the user work stations already present in the claim according to the main request. The third feature is a straight-forward automation motivated by the non-technical requirement that a branch manager's request for customer information receive a quick reply (cf the decision under appeal, point 10.3).

Thus, the subject-matter of claim 1 also does not involve an inventive step (Article 56 EPC 1973).

Auxiliary request 4

6. The appellants have explained that the amendments to claim 1 of this request are intended to overcome the objections with respect to clarity raised in the Board's communication. The changes have however no importance for the question of inventive step. Furthermore, independent claim 11 is identical with claim 11 of the main request. Thus this request is also refused (Article 56 EPC 1973).