One calls it “Mobile Photo Bill Pay.” The other the “iPhone App with Photo Bill Pay.”

One allows consumers to “use your smartphone to snap a picture of your bill, verify the payment information and hit ‘PAY.'” The other says consumers “can snap a quick picture with their iPhone and our technology will take care of the rest.”

One company is Mitek Systems. The other is Balance Financial. Both might be on a patent war collision course.

Lost in the news on Sept. 8 that Balance Financial, a personal finance startup, was launching its iPhone app with photo bill pay was the fact that Mitek has launched such a technology already. And it has a patent application on the technology pending. Mitek’s application, number 12/906,036, was filed last Oct. 15 for “mobile image capture and remittance processing.”

Devin Miller, Balance Financial’s CEO, declined to comment about Mitek’s patent. What he did say, however, was that while payment patents are “quite wide,” the patents address “pieces” of payments, but not “the entire process.”

“The key thing about our mobile app is the processing in the backend,” he told Bank Innovation. “We don’t integrate” the consumer’s data with other banks, unlike Mitek, he said.

Although the “process might be identical, if that other piece is slightly different, the patent isn’t defensible,” he added, emphasizing too that Mitek currently has but a patent application on the technology, not an actual patent.

(See more general comments from Miller on FI patents here.)

One long-time patent attorney I spoke with essentially confirmed Miller’s understanding. However, the patent attorney said, “that doesn’t mean Mitek won’t sue Balance.”

And that’s really what is striking here — that Balance, a startup, would risk a Mitek lawsuit. Certainly, the technology is important to Mitek, and many banking technology companies are aware of Mitek’s IP turf. For example, I was in Toronto this week for Sibos and in a meeting I had with SAP, company officials were clear that while they are working on a robust mobile corporate banking platform (more on that in a later blog), SAP was licensing the remote data capture IP from Mitek for the endeavor. Mitek, for its part, is signing up banks to use its mobile RDC at a rapid clip of about 80 banks per month, and certainly views its patents as a strategic advantage.

I’ve written about the dampening effect patents could have on financial services innovation, and after considering the Mitek-Balance situation, I question my stance. In the end, it boils down to this: What will Mitek do about Balance Financial?