Nokia launches Nokia Money, a mobile financial service
Nokia has introduced Nokia Money, a new mobile financial service offering consumers with mobile device access to basic financial services. For many consumers, this will be the first time they have had any access to such financial services.
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.
4 billion mobile phones but only 1.6 billion bank accounts
“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 that many mobile phone users have very 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”, said Mary McDowell, EVP and Chief Development Officer, Nokia.
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.
“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”, said Teppo Paavola, VP and Head of Corporate Business Development, Nokia.
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4 comments:
Short message servive is todays era of communication,fast ,reliable,result orianted and most imp cheap to get required work done.
Worldwide this service is growing day by day as there is increase in mobile handset users.
SMS service is used by many ways as per requirement of end users , short code playes imp role for getting users comment via replies sent on shortcode OR different polls organised by newspapers or news channels.
And future envirnoment also forecasted as supportive for SMS servive with better use of technology.
<--Nokia Rolling out Micro Finance for Mobile Handsets in India-->>
Nokia plans to roll out a micro financing program for mobile phones across 12 states in India.
The company has completed a pilot of this program across 2,500 villages in the rural areas of the Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka states of India. Nokia tied up for the pilot with a micro finance institution to offer mobile handsets on installments of 100 Indian rupees (US$2) a week for 25 weeks.
The company said in a statement on Wednesday that it expects that the benefits of mobility will reach 500 million people in the country by next year.
The penetration of mobile phones in rural India is still very low at 13 percent, and much of the growth in mobile telephony will be in non-urban markets, the company said. Its objective is to lower access barriers as well as total cost of ownership in these markets, it added.
Nokia did not name its micro finance partner.
The mobile phone giant is also launching Nokia Life Tools commercially in the country this year, which includes a range of agriculture information and education services targeted at non-urban consumers. The service was tested in Maharashtra state.
India added 12 million mobile subscribers in June, the latest month for which data is available, taking the total number of subscribers to 427 million, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).
Mobile service operators and handset makers are targeting India's rural market as the next big opportunity. The rural market is however low margin and geographically dispersed, Kamlesh Bhatia, a principal research analyst at Gartner, said last month.
Data from TRAI for the first quarter of this year showed declining ARPU (average revenue per user) and utilization of mobile phones by consumers, across service providers, reflecting the economic slowdown and expansion of services in rural markets.
<--Etisalat and Reliance to Share Infrastructure in India-->
Etisalat has decided on a low-capital entry into India's communications market, outsourcing its passive telecom infrastructure requirements to Indian operator Reliance Communications and its subsidiary infrastructure services company Reliance Infratel.
Under an agreement announced on Wednesday, Etisalat's joint venture in India will pay the two Reliance companies 100 billion Indian rupees (US$2 billion) over ten years.
Etisalat has operations in 17 countries in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Its Indian joint venture, Etisalat DB Telecom, has licenses to offer telecommunications services in 15 circles in India. The Unified Services Access License it holds allows it to offer a variety of services including mobile and fixed telephony services, and Internet services.
The company plans to roll out services in India by the end of this year, starting with mobile services, a spokeswoman for Etisalat DB Telecom said on Wednesday.
Reliance Communications has set up the Reliance Infratel subsidiary to address a growing market from telecom service providers, particularly mobile service operators, for shared infrastructure services.
Etisalat DB Telecom said that by outsourcing the running of telecom infrastructure to Reliance, it will be able to accelerate its rollout of telecom services in India.
A number of telecom service providers are expected to take this route to get quickly to market, while existing mobile operators are hiving of their infrastructure businesses into separate services companies.
Idea Cellular, a large Indian mobile services provider, said earlier this month that it received shareholder approval to transfer its communications towers and other passive infrastructure to a subsidiary company, Idea Cellular Towers Infrastructure.
The new subsidiary will later be merged into a joint venture company, Indus Towers, that has been set up by three communications companies -- Idea, Vodafone Essar, and Bharti Airtel. The joint venture company will be in the business of building, managing and offering shared network infrastructure services.
By hiring infrastructure rather than investing in it, mobile operators can free up capital, Kamlesh Bhatia, a principal research analyst at Gartner said recently in an interview. As infrastructure gets commoditized, operators are instead focusing on marketing, brand, new applications, and service innovations, he added.
"Mobile Financial Services"
New High Margin Revenue Streams
The proliferation of mobile phones globally together with the de-regulation of the financial services market has provided new opportunities for trusted brands.
Suddenly companies with millions of customers and broad distribution channels, be they mobile operators, retailers or on-line brands, have an opportunity to participate in the high margins of financial services, previously enjoyed by banks and associated financial services companies. However, with this comes steep a learning curve, change management issues and severe penalties by financial services authorities for negligence. A number of questions need to be addressed. How can we understand the regulatory minefield including Knowing Your Customer (KYC), Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Countering the Financing of Terrorism (CFT)? How can employees, distribution channels and customers be educated on these new products? What services will our customer base want and why?
Mobile Financial Services has built a set of technology and service capabilities to address these challenges and provide end to end solutions to add value in our business to business delivery mode
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