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Is this the first Universal Mobile Credit Card?

While Vodafone made quite a splash with its "micro-payment" mechanism for spending sums smaller than five pounds, this only works for Vodafone subscribers. Bango works on them all.

You can, today, buy something trivial - say, a trendy ring-tone for your phone - over the Internet. But if you've got a Vodafone phone, you can't buy the ringtone from Cellnet. Or from Orange.

But you can set up a micro-payment account with startup Bango.net which will spend the odd 25 pence or so on trivia - say, sending a snapshot home from holiday? - and it will work whatever phone company provides your handset.

Ray Anderson, founder and CEO of Bango.net says he is "enabling content providers to charge for services. For example," he suggested, "you might like to notify your subscribers of news stories via SMS, and they might decide it was worth paying five cents to see the story there and then. How are you going to collect the money?"

I could do it for Vodafone subscribers, by setting up an account with them. And then I'd have to do it for Cellnet. And then for Telia. And then for Orange, and then for One-2-One; then Movistar in Spain, and so on.

Or, I could set up with Bango.net, who are "partners" with all of the above.

This isn't to decry the product announced by Jim Wadsworth of Vodafone at the same mobile commerce exhibition at Olympia, London, this week. Far from it; Vodafone will make its share of every transaction that goes through Bango.net - and without Vodafone's "m-pay bill" product, Bango couldn't operate.

From March, customers wanting to buy a cheap product using their phone can sign up for m-pay bill , and after that, any money they spend, will be added to their phone bill.