Nokia, Microsoft, and PayPal have all taken fascinating steps in recent days to enable more financial services aimed at the poor and unbanked…someday.

Just today, Nokia announced it plans to launch a mobile financial service next year, to be called Nokia Money. It target consumers in emerging markets with a phone but no bank account. Nokia Money will be based on the Obopay platform.

This isn’t Nokia’s first move into providing content to a low-income clientele using the company’s handsets. In April, Nokia announced it completed trials of its Life Tools service. It’s icon-based, which Nokia says helps reduce language and literacy barriers. Its services are geared to farmers (customizable commodity prices, weather, seed and fertilizer availability) and students (English lessons, exam prep). It works on a new generation of handsets which Nokia has targeted at value-conscious customers who want browsing on the cheap. So far, that’s two Nokia phones running around USD 100, so there’s still a lot of distance to cover in cost and range of devices. But the idea behind Life Tools is exciting: browsing at a price affordable not to the economic elite, but hundreds of millions of more ordinary consumers.

A little more futuristic, but possibly even more exciting are moves Microsoft and PayPal have made in the internet space. Talking about the internet and ordinary Africans is not too far fetched. For the first time, more than half of the handsets shipped to Africa last year had internet capability, according to Gartner. Most are so-called feature phones, a step up from basic handsets that do voice and text and little else, but a rung below smart phones. In other words, the majority of Africans who buy a new handset this year will have the capability to access the internet via mobile.

Of course, capability is not actuality. People will want quality services before they spend their coin on firing up the internet on their phones.

On Monday, Microsoft announced OneApp, an application that enables people with phones with slow processors and not a lot of memory to surf the web like they had more powerful handsets. It will be downloadable for free, first in South Africa with Microsoft’s partner, Blue Label Telecoms, which is a leading distributor of prepaid secure electronic tokens of value (such as airtime). To start, OneApp users will be able to access a dozen websites like Facebook and Twitter. Plans are to expand to other countries and offer progressively wider access to more websites. Mobile banking anyone?

Microsoft aren’t the only ones trying to bring the bells and whistles of the internet to developing countries. Last month, PayPal announced it will open up its platform to third party developers. Software developers, whether sitting in their underwear in a garage in Silicon Valley or writing code for a boutique software firm in Hyderabad, will have open access to PayPal’s application programming interfaces (APIs) and be able to embed PayPal into any other internet service.

This alone isn’t enough to crack open internet banking for the poor: PayPal may claim to be in 190 markets, but its not terribly easy to access the service in all of those places. But I can now imagine a local licensed financial institution teaming up with a developer (maybe also local) to enable remittances via PayPal (which at PayPal’s current prices could easily beat Western Union).

The next breakthrough in banking for the poor may not be through internet banking. In fact, most would bet against it. But then again, if someone would have told you in 2006 that 1 in 5 Kenyans would sign up for a mobile remittance service in the next 24 months, you probably would have bet against that too.