Earlier today, Nokia announced that it was launching Nokia Money, a new payment service powered by Obopay that allows users to send money to friends, merchants, and service companies simply by using their phone numbers. The service will be showcased in early September at the Nokia World conference, with plans to roll it out to select markets in 2010.
As we wrote when news broke of Obopay’s $70 million funding round (of which Nokia was a major participant in), one of the biggest markets for this technology is in regions like India, where many people have phones with pre-paid SIM cards but don’t have bank accounts. And judging by Nokia’s press release, which emphasizes that there are “4 billion mobile phone users and only 1.6 billion bank accounts”, the company seems to agree. From the release:
“Rural consumers will particularly benefit from money transfers and, for urban consumers used to online services, we are enabling services such as payment of utility bills, purchase of train and movie tickets, top-ups, all through their mobile phones. Nokia Money is simple to use, secure and available across different operator networks and on virtually any mobile phone. This means millions of new consumers will soon be able to manage all their financial needs from their mobile phone”
Nokia will hardly be the only player in these emerging markets — other competitors include mChek and Paymate. We’ve also seen some alternative payment models like Aryty, which allows users in the US to remotely charge up the mobile accounts of family and friends in India and the Philippines.
Stateside, the technology will also likely see some success, though it will be competing with a variety of other payment methods, and US users haven’t been nearly as quick at adopting mobile payments as customers in other regions have been. Nokia’s release notes that while the technology will be based on Obopay, it will be making a number of improvements and will allow the payment service to interoperate with competing services.
I live in Peru, and here, a service like this can be very successful.
I thought that said Obamapay
Does tis work in Africa?
ROFL
It can shove ANYTHING down your throat before you will say ‘ma!’, kid. 
It’s not your funny AT&T thingy. 
Do you understand what you are talking about? … like AT ALL? It’s Nokia! The company that has manufactured almost a half of these handsets and the dominant force in GSM consortium.
By the way, I was waiting for this move since 1998. They didn’t do it only because this business might have disrupted their handset sales. Now that the handset sales dropped considerably Olila made a move. It was predictable.
So the idea is sell smart phones to people who can not allow a bank account, and probably without good internet access ? They replace Western Union commission with the cost of the phone.
Google voice is a much smarter move for a mobile OS supplier.
Mark, I think you may have misinterpreted the article.
Nokia is a bit the platform of the mobile world, like Microsoft Windows is the platform of the PC.
If they manage to push this into emerging country markets where people have no bank account, the telecoms become the banks by default.
A pre-paid card is a wallet.
Sounds like this is going to save people alot of time! However one must be concerned about the security implications tha may be involved, not sure if I’d feel comfortable transferring money just by typing in a phone number.
Looks like Nokia is targeting the developing countries market pioneered by Vodafone with their M-PESA mobile payments service in Kenya. For cheap emerging markets phones (Nokia’s strong area) implementing this service on the SIM card would work. However, for more developed markets I wonder what kind of APIs Nokia will provide for mobile app developers. Apple is already going for in-app payments, but has not targeted peer to peer payments, or any to any payments in general (ie, where the app vendor is not always the recipient of the money). Seems like Nokia wants to run their Money completely independent of the operators.
Sorry the off subject..
But don’t know what’s the function is call or how I shall search it.
My question:
Where can I read about the nice feature that happens when I drag a picture in this article? I can only see that it is powed by mebo. But no god results on google..
Emerging markets seem to be a hot market for web app companies it seems. HyperOffice also recently partnered with Tata Communications to offer their online collaboration suite in India – http://news.prn...0013&EDATE=
“4 billion mobile phone users and only 1.6 billion bank accounts”
I think I know why the difference is so big. To maintain a bank account you need to maintain some money in your account and of course to many bank accounts will create harder to manage our finance.
A person with a Ten Bank accounts and another person with two or three banks accounts. you can guess which person manage his finance much batter and esaly
Another thing is if you wanna manage 5 or 6 companies sim cards it will not that hard to manage. And you can get a simcard with a lifetime validity with a cost of $10 so loos just $50 and get 5 sim cards from different mobile service providers.
Here in India every person having atleast two or three phone or sim for use. I think that’s why 4 billion mobile phone users and only 1.6 billion bank accounts.
Nokia sold people to their deaths this year at the hands of the Iranian regime.
See Nokia’s blog:
http://blogs.no...bility-in-iran/
(And Nokia are still piously defending their commercial right to conduct this ‘lawful intercept’ ‘business’).
Is this really a company you want handling a developing nations finances?
Probably this only makes sense if you are the recipient of Nokia-Siemens notorious bribery alacrity:
http://online.w...9803304383.html