Nokia announced the launch of Nokia Money today, its financial services offering which allows mobile users to make payments and manage their finances via their handsets.

While we are quite excited about the service we are a little apprehensive to test it' that would require us sending money to someone.

Nokia claims to be developing a network of Nokia Money agents, where users can deposit money or withdraw cash from their accounts. The service is apparently easy to use and will allow users to transfer funds, top-up their prepaid accounts and even pay merchants.

"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.

We have received no indication of when the service will be launched in South Africa, but it will be officially launched at the Nokia World 2009 conference to be from 2-3 September in Stuttgart, Germany. The global roll-out of the service is planned for 2010.