ONE TO WATCH: DATATREASURY CORP. - This holding company has decided to go strong with their patent portfolio, and has started suing big names in the finance industry.

These lawsuits are becoming more common, with the targets being banks or others in financial services (for example, see Trading Technologies and the turmoil their patent are causing). The company, the DataTreasury Corp. of Melville, N.Y., has sued companies that it says have infringed on its two patents, which describe a way to store and retrieve transaction records electronically. Generally speaking, this is already the way that credit card transactions are processed and, increasingly, the way that paper checks are handled, too.

Among the dozen or so companies that DataTreasury has sued are JP Morgan Chase & Co., one of the biggest banks; the First Data Corp., the biggest credit card processor; and the Electronic Data Systems Corp., another big processor.

The suits are wending their ways through courts in Texas that lawyers say are well known for upholding the rights of patent holders (Marshall Texas, perhaps?). They seek unspecified damages, and to ban the companies from using the processing architecture that the patents describe.

This type of litigation is unusual for financial services, which have taken for granted that there are certain basic ways to process payments. Although banks did not bother to patent these systems, others did, especially after a 1998 court ruling broadened the definition of a patent to include business methods and processes. At the time, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office was swamped with technology-related applications, and knew very little about the processing of payments.