Patent # 6078806

What if you could hold a balance of electronic cash on your cell phone and pay your bills, buy your groceries, and send money to any other cell phone with the ease of a text message?

For one, you would be thinking along the same lines as four Nokia engineers back in 1998 that patented a 'mobile station payment system.' And with good reason.

In a world where Visa and Mastercard rake in about 3 billion in profit every year, atm fees account for an increasing large portion of bank revenue, and the World Bank measures remittances add up to a whooping $290 billion in 2009, an electronic cash SMS-esque payment system would cut quite a figure and contribute hugely to the social benifit to the cash-using working poor.

With this spread, and when Nokia in its application competition called for applications in "Emerging Markets and Mobile Necessities," what is stopping this mobil payment system from going forward?

The same year that Petri Heinonen, Mikko Terho, Matti J. Marttila,and Markku Rautiola were sweating in their wool socks in Nokia, Finnland developing a mobile station payment system, a little e-commerce company called Paypal was born in Palo Alto, California. And, whereas traditional banks might not service a mobile cash system, Paypal, l'enfant terrible of the finance world, probably would. Could we expect to see a Nokia/Paypal partnership in the future?