A 2014 filing on iris-based payments now sits in the prosecution files of Mastercard, Samsung, Sony, and Worldpay — cited, never licensed
Monkeetech LLC, a small New York technology firm, received a patent assignment in May 2014 from its inventor, Kenneth Carnesi, Sr. Once published as US20150120543A1 under the name “EyeWatch ATM and Wire Transfer Fraud Prevention System,” EyeWatch sketched out an idea that’s now routine at checkout counters in parts of Europe and the Gulf: scan a shopper’s iris, turn it into an encrypted digital code, match that code against a stored copy, and clear the transaction — skipping the card, the PIN, everything. Carnesi had already filed an earlier, narrower version of the same idea himself, focused only on credit card fraud at point of sale and online, before filing a second application that widened it to cover ATM withdrawals and bank transfers.
The process itself was simple to follow: snap an iris photo, turn it into an encrypted number rather than keeping the image itself, park that number on the customer’s own phone or computer by default, and only move it to a bank’s server if the customer explicitly agrees. Later scans get checked against that stored number before any money moves. Swap out a few dated references to specific gadgets, and the pattern reads almost exactly like what’s running today inside Empik stores in Poland through PayEye’s eyePOS units, or at wage payout counters in Jordan through IrisGuard’s network.
What became of the filing
The application stalled short of becoming a real patent. USPTO records show it was dropped in September 2017 after nobody responded to an office action — a fate that hits plenty of small filers once the legal bills for fighting rejections climb past what they can afford. No rights were ever locked in. Yet a paper trail links this dropped filing to the patent family that today’s iris-payment rollouts actually rely on: that chain starts with a provisional filing SRI International put in back in October 2013, runs through two of its issued patents, and lands eventually at Princeton Identity, whose tech underlies the legal groundwork behind both the IrisGuard and PayEye systems. Carnesi’s work and SRI’s work grew up separately, about a year apart, and nothing in the record suggests the two teams ever crossed paths.
The sharper connection points somewhere else. Two of Mastercard’s own patents — one covering wearable-device payments, plus its follow-up filing — list the abandoned EyeWatch application as prior art. Both Mastercard filings landed roughly three months after Carnesi’s original one. Somewhere inside Mastercard’s legal team, an examiner combing through payment-authentication prior art pulled Carnesi’s filing into the file. That’s a citation, nothing more — not a deal, not a license — but it plants Carnesi’s name inside Mastercard’s own paperwork a full ten years ahead of Mastercard’s actual glance-to-pay pilot with PayEye in Poland.
A career built on rules, not circuits
A profile The Leader Report ran in July 2026 sketches out who Carnesi is outside the patent filing. His path runs through legal study and financial oversight rather than a lab bench. Law school came first, at New York Law School, followed by additional training on how international banking actually works, taken through a certificate program at Harvard Law. Wharton’s entrepreneurship curriculum rounded things out. Two professional circles round out the picture: he’s affiliated with both the compliance-focused International Association of Regulatory Compliance Professionals and the ethics-oriented Society for Corporate Compliance and Ethics. That background lines up with how the EyeWatch filing reads — less like a gadget pitch, more like a risk manager’s checklist: encrypt everything, get explicit permission before storing anything on a server, and hand control of enrollment to the user rather than a bank or a platform.
The same write-up places Carnesi today at Anaptyx, LLC, where he holds the title of Chief Operating Officer and Director of Government Sales, running the firm’s Government Contracts and Regulatory Compliance divisions. That work hasn’t gone unnoticed — a 2024 Global Recognition Award for leadership in the IT and bulk Wi-Fi network space, plus a finalist spot in the 2025 ONCON ICON Top 100 COO Award, both came his way during this same stretch of his career. The profile also backs up the basic patent timeline here — filed in 2014, dropped in 2017, cited later by four large companies — while stressing that none of those citations mean any of those companies endorsed, bought, or adopted anything Carnesi built.
Nobody invented this alone
Look at the wider 2013–2014 filing window and a single-inventor story doesn’t hold up — several separate groups were chasing near-identical ground at once. A biometrics lab inside SRI International was working the problem. So was EyeLock. A patent team connected to American Express’s wearable payment gadgets was circling similar territory too. Carnesi’s filings were one more entry in that same crowded field. Only the SRI branch of that family tree turned into the licensed foundation that today’s commercial iris-checkout companies actually build on. EyeWatch’s applications ran out of runway before USPTO objections got resolved — money, not merit, ended the process. Still, an inventor working alone, arriving independently at the same core mechanism, later showing up in Mastercard’s own cited prior art years before Mastercard had any iris program running — that’s worth noting on its own terms. Arriving first and surviving the patent office aren’t the same accomplishment, and the more interesting read here isn’t a simple invention myth. It’s a case where more than one person saw the same solution coming, and the paperwork proves it.
Carnesi’s book EyeWatch, which chronicles this story in full, is available at www.books.by/kenneth-carnesi-sr More on his work can be found at www.kennethcarnesiauthor.com
Sources: US20150120543A1 (Google Patents); US9818114B2 and US10242363B2 citation records (Google Patents); US9195890B2 and US10038691B2 (Google Patents); Mastercard Newsroom coverage of its biometric checkout pilot (2024); Biometric Update reporting on Mastercard’s Poland rollout; IrisGuard EyePay Network product materials; The Leader Report profile of Kenneth Carnesi, Sr. (July 8, 2026).
