Nokia introduced Nokia Money on Wednesday, which lets anyone with a phone send and receive money with a text message or voice call. You can send money to someone by using their phone number. It will also be possible to pay merchants and bills this way. Nokia will also build a network of Nokia Money agents where consumers can deposit or withdraw cash from their accounts.

Nokia Money service will be operated in cooperation with Obopay, which Nokia invested in earlier this year. The service will be shown for the first time at Nokia World and is planned to be rolled out gradually to selected markets, beginning in early 2010.

I checked out Obopay’s site briefly to see how their system works. I assume Nokia Money will work the same way. It is basically like Paypal, which most of us are already familiar with. We initially either add our bank accounts and/or credit cards then add funds we can use for the payments. The Nokia Money agents should be very useful for those who don’t have bank accounts.