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“This is a recent global financial phenomenon,” Death said. “It’s really come out in the past, I would say, decade.”

Patents given companies exclusive rights to make, use and sell their inventions for a limited time, something that could give banks a significant edge as the industry becomes more technologically driven.

TD is developing such “patent currency,” Death said, that could someday be “leveraged in different ways as the business sort of sees fit.”

Examples of what the banks want to patent are showing up in the publicly available filings.

A March 2018 patent assigned to TD Bank in the U.S. was for “systems and methods for providing balance notifications in an augmented reality environment.”

Patent filings can be highly technical, but augmented reality, or AR, generally refers to technology that can superimpose computer-generated images over the real world when it is viewed through smartphones or glasses. TD’s patent said the operations could include presenting information through a device “and within a field-of-view of the user.”

Another TD patent in the U.S., dated Jan. 2018, is for “image recognition-based payment requests” that could include “performing an automated computer-based facial recognition process” to identify one of the parties involved.

Blockchain, the digital and distributed ledger system that is used to track transactions of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, appears to be a particular area of interest for the banks.