T 2626/18 (Insurance risk prediction/SWISS RE) of 28.09.2022

Inventive step - all requests (no)
Inventive step - insurance risk predicition and loss frequency (not technical)

The appellant argued that the claimed features relating to the abstract business concept neither could have been provided by the business person to the technical expert for programming, nor would the technical expert have corresponding knowledge starting from a networked standard computer system. The appellant thereby alleged that there was to be considered an imaginary third person who came up with the concept of the invention to be implemented on a computer system. The Board notes that when assessing inventive step in the field of computer implemented business related inventions following the COMVIK approach and the corresponding case law, there is no room for such a third expert. When analysing the features of a claim and answering the question of whether they provide a technical contribution, each such feature has to be judged to be either a contribution of the technical expert or of the non-technical business person in order to conclude whether there is an inventive technical contribution. (See point 4.13 of the reasons)