Finland’s Nokia, the world’s
largest manufacturer of mobile phones, is launching an ambitious
mobile phone-based payments service in 2010 with the aim of
bringing the world’s unbanked into mainstream financial
services.
Nokia Money, being run in conjunction with US
m-payments and person-to-person technology specialist Obopay, will
let people send money to each other ‘mobile-to-mobile’ as well as
pay merchants for goods and services, pay utility bills and
recharge prepaid SIM cards.
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Without giving further details, Nokia, which
took an undisclosed minority stake in Obopay earlier this year,
said it was building a “wide network of Nokia Money agents, where
consumers can deposit money in or withdraw cash from their
accounts”.
In a statement, Mary
McDowell, chief development officer at Nokia, said: “We
believe mobile financial services offer a market opportunity with
long-term growth potential. In many countries, mobile phone
ownership significantly exceeds bank account usage, suggesting many
mobile phone users have limited or no access to basic financial
services.
“With more than 4 billion mobile phone users
and only 1.6 billion bank accounts, global demand for access to
financial services presents a strong opportunity to combine mobile
devices with simple but powerful financial services such as Nokia
Money.”
The service is based on Obopay’s mobile
payment platform, though it will be complemented with “unique and
newly developed” mobile elements. Nokia adds it also intends the
service to be open and interoperable with other payment
services.
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By GlobalDataAll watching Kenya’s
M-Pesa
Nokia and Obobay, as well as a host
of other new P2P services, will be closely watching the M-Pesa
service in Kenya from mobile telco Safaricom. In its annual report,
Safaricom said that the number of M-Pesa users rose by 200 percent
from 2.08 million as of March 2008 to 6.18 million at the end of
March this year.
Some KEH120.6 billion ($1.58 billion) was
transferred in the 12-month period compared to KEH14.74 billion, an
annual growth rate of 718 percent (see
case study, RBI 617).
