It looks like team members for Nokia's mobile money product in India are coming back for more. The core team of Nokia Money, which was shut down and sold by Nokia earlier this year, has announced that its launching iKaaz. Among other things, iKaaz will offer a white-label mobile payment platform and mobile-wallet solution to banks, network operators and merchants in the Indian market. 

"The iKaaz solution can be delivered in the form of a mobile app across all types of mobile phones, as well as through SMS and USSD channels for lower-end phones that do not support apps," said Soma Sundaram, founder and CEO of iKaaz. Sundaram was head of Nokia Money's integration engineering. He said the iKaaz app will let bank or prepaid account holders initiate money transfers and merchant transactions, merchant's customers to pay their bills and subscribers of mobile service providers to recharge accounts with just their mobile phones.

In addition, iKaaz will introduce a mobile point-of-sale solution for merchants to process electronic payments using mobile devices and a "tap-and-pay" solution using NFC technologies to enable payments at the point of sale.

Sundaram said both consumers and merchants benefit from iKaaz's solutions. "On one hand, customers can transform their mobile phones into a mobile wallet using a smart iKaaz NFC tag and complete payments faster at merchant locations. On the other hand, merchants can benefit by significantly reducing the transaction processing fees typically paid for conventional settlements," he said.

The Indian market for mobile payments is potentially huge. India has nearly 1 billion mobile phone subscribers according to the country's telecommunications regulatory authority, but the World Bank reported recently that only a third of the country's inhabitants have a bank account of any kind.

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