Cash is so 20th century — the germ infested coins, the cocaine-laced bills and the burden of actually carrying it — which is why these days many of us simply pull out the debit card for everything but garage sales and (dare I say) strip clubs. Nokia hopes to take the cash-free vision to a whole other level with pay-by-phone technology, according to a Wired article.
It’s not a new technology and mobile users in mostly emerging economies — primarily due to the fact that more people have mobile phones than PCs or even bank accounts — have been quick to adopt the pay-by-phone concept. With the Wednesday launch of Nokia Money, the Finnish mobile technology company hopes to accelerate its adoption not just in developing countries but perhaps also in the United States.
Some of Nokia Money’s functions include paying bills (as with online bill-paying services), purchasing goods or services directly from a merchant (as with an ATM card), sending money and recharging prepaid phone cards.
Mary McDowell, Nokia’s executive vice president and chief development officer, explains the market opportunity in a recent press release: “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.”
A US rollout of the service has yet to be announced, if at all, but an analyst quoted by Wired says he believes the strong growth in smartphone use in the United States may make the market ripe sometime down the road. “There are a lot of pilot projects that are currently being developed,” Javelin Strategy head payments researcher Bruce Cundliff told Wired.
Add Facebook’s new mobile payments system, currently in beta in the United States, to the list.
It’s one step closer to a bar code tattooed to our heads, but something tells me mobile payments will be much more benign.
Image courtesy of Nokia, from the company’s online media center