Nokia’s new mobile money

Yesterday, Nokia launched Nokia Money, a new mobile financial service enables financial management and payments from a mobile phone – aimed specifically at emerging markets.

From the Nokia press release:

“Nokia Money has been designed to be as simple and convenient as making a voice call or sending an SMS. It will enable consumers to send money to another person just by using the person’s mobile phone number, as well as to pay merchants for goods and services, pay their utility bills, or recharge their prepaid SIM cards (SIM top-up). The services can be accessed 24 hours a day from anywhere, meaning savings in travel costs and time. Nokia is building a wide network of Nokia Money agents, where consumers can deposit money in or withdraw cash from their accounts.” […]

“Mobile payments will be the next step for delivering financial services to hundreds of millions of people, both urban and rural, who are underserved by existing payment means, especially in emerging economies.” […]

“The Nokia Money service will be operated in cooperation with Obopay, a leader in developing global mobile payment solutions, which Nokia invested in earlier this year. The service is based on Obopay’s mobile payment platform, with unique and newly developed mobile elements. Nokia intends the service to be open and interoperable with other payment services as well.”

The announcement received a huge amount of press and blog play – a round up:

CGAP: “This alone isn’t enough to crack open internet banking for the poor: PayPal may claim to be in 190 markets, but its not terribly easy to access the service in all of those places.”

CNET News: “The new service may find a special niche in the U.S., which has lagged behind countries such as Japan in the ability to pay for items on the fly through a cell phone. “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,” said Teppo Paavola, Nokia VP and head of corporate business development.”

Deals & More: “It sounds like it won’t just be for the owners of Nokia phones, though, since the company says it will work on ‘virtually any mobile phone.'”

Fast Company: “Nokia has already said it plans to become the world’s largest entertainment network through its vast share of the mobile handset market. Now it looks like the Finnish mobile device maker aims to become the world’s largest mobile bank as well.”

Financial Times: “The developing world will likely be Nokia’s first target as it seeks to roll the programme out. […] Nokia sees a market opportunity here, and said there are 4bn mobile phone users today, compared with 1.6bn bank accounts.”

Kiwanja/Ken Banks: “Details remain a little sketchy, but Nokia Money appears to be operator-independent, meaning mobile owners on any network can send or receive payments to anyone else on any other network. This would be a direct challenge to many existing models which require users to switch networks, or to be on the same network as the mobile service they’re looking to use. In addition, it looks like Nokia Money users can sign-up without needing to swap out their SIM cards, making up-take of the service considerably more efficient logistically. If this thing were to grow, it could grow fast.”

Register Hardware: “Unimaginatively called Nokia Money, the service will enable you to send money to someone else using their mobile number.”

Reuters: “Mobile money is one of the hottest topics in the wireless world, but so far take-up of services has been limited mostly to a few emerging markets, as in developed countries, the popularity of online banking has been a brake on mobile money.”

Techcrunch: “Nokia will hardly be the only player in these emerging markets — other competitors include mChek and Paymate.”

The Register: “Nokia isn’t the first company to look at payments via SMS – your correspondent managed to pay for a meal by text back in 2002, just – but with Nokia’s brand behind it, and a focus on economies where traditional banks are hard to come by, it could be the one that makes it.”

Wall Street Journal: “‘This is absolutely what Nokia should do,’ as there will be big demand for mobile financial services and because the company has so far struggled to offer attractive, easy-to-use applications that rival those provided by the iPhone’s App Store, said Evli Bank analyst Michael Andersson, who has has an accumulate rating on the share.”