Nokia Money – Finnish giant aim to replace your wallet with your phone

Not content with simple phones or laptops any more, Finnish giant Nokia has now set its sights on becoming a financial service as well, according to The Register. The main goal of Nokia Money is for use in developing countries, where the mobile megacorp wants to provide the convenience of actually having a banking system to people who, essentially, haven’t got one.

Once you see the figures, you can understand the reasoning behind it, since roughly 4 billion people round the world have a mobile phone, but only around 1.6 billion people have a bank account.

What Nokia Money’s first goal is, essentially, is to let people in the developing world have an electronic means of managing their funds, letting them do things like check their balance, transfer funds, and pay bills, using text messages. And since the service is based on the existing Obopay service (but with extra mobile bits glued on), it’d be cross network, and it’d work on any handset. Of course, local infrastructure needs building up, with a network of Nokia Money agents on the ground, as it were.

So that’s pretty cool.

Ah, but Nokia’s plans don’t end there. They reckon we’d all like to pay for stuff using our mobile phones, and so, the rest of their plans, from what I can tell, call for something a bit more like a mobile version of Paypal, the plan being to let urban users use the service for things like buying train or movie tickets, or paying utility bills, through the phone itself.

The problem is, I’m not entirely sure everyone wants to do that. We’ve seen a fair few mobile payment systems appear in the UK, but I’ve yet to see one that’s had a massive impact. It’ almost as if people don’t want to whop out their Nokia 5530, or whatever, and use that to pay for stuff.

Still, now the basic concept of mobile payments has got Nokia’s name attached to it (the biggest name in the industry, let’s not forget), could this be the time when mobile money services come of age?

Hmm, I honestly don’t know how to call that one. I guess time will tell, over here in Blighty. But in the developing world, where Nokia are really going to focus their attention with Nokia Money, I reckon they could be onto a winner…