With Bango’s CEO Ray Anderson being recognised for Outstanding Contribution to the Mobile Industry in 2006, Bango went on to win the ‘Best Payment Provider’ in 2007, again in 2008, and now in 2011, a testament to the continued growth of Bango’s industry leading payments platform.

Bango received the award in recognition of its success as a leading payment provider for app stores, including BlackBerry App World, and its rapidly expanding direct operator billing connections, micro payment capabilities and payment reporting which links to its successful analytics products.

Bango is unable to disclose information about the sales of our customers, but a small Blackberry App seller has published a Blog entry here.

According to EBSCER: “Use of carrier billing has increased for the 14th straight month. September saw the use of carrier billing increase to 41.3% of all sales.”  and looking at the graph he provides it is easy to see that the share of billing via carrier (Mobile Operator) – which is powered by Bango – is accelerating fast.

Where sales in territories are currently restricted to paypal or credit card
only, significant additional revenue is anticipated with the addition of carrier
billing.

Ray

Bango is focussed on collecting payments from applications running on a mobile device – typically with a mobile operator connection from that device.

Bango technology and our direct carrier relationships enable us to provide a superior user experience which delivers more sales.

Here is a slide which shows (in a “gamer friendly way”) why Bango is better on mobile:

See: http://press.rim.com/release.jsp?id=5214 for a list of apps and more details.

Bango gets a very small share of the sale of each BlackBerry App World App, for providing the carrier payment infrastructure, payment processing and settlement services.

If Apps that would otherwise have been sold are provided free of charge, then during that 8-10 week period Bango would lose that portion of its revenue.  Ten Apps are being offered free of charge in App World – out of thousands that are for sale, so it is unlikley there will be a significant revenue impact.

On the other hand, it is a common practice to give away Premium Apps in some of the other App Stores – most notably Amazon’s – offer free Premium Apps to drive new users to their store, and drive customer delight and encourage more sales later.  See http://www.amazon.com/mobile-apps/b?node=2350149011

There is therefore a possible upside in this Premium App give-away in that it may stimulate users to buy more Apps and to visit the App World more often.

We believe this is a generous gesture by RIM to reward users for their patience and loyalty, which could have the side effect of helping more users discover the benefits of quality Apps on their BlackBerries.

This latest accolade is a testament to the longevity of the Bango technology and business that launched the idea of mobile payments for internet-enabled phones in many markets. Bango continues to pioneer new payment technologies to meet the growing demand for digital content and services from smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. The Bango platform is emerging as the mobile industry’s “open market” alternative to Apple iTunes for payments, powering major app stores such as BlackBerry App World.

Mike showed a slide to outline the key capabilities of App World 3.0, which has just started to be deployed to Blackberry users.  Alongside the enhanced merchandizing and discovery features of BBAW, the importance of Carrier Billing was mentioned, and the  fact that Carrier Billing (which is powered by Bango) was now live in TEN countries.

Bango started enabling Carrier Billing for BBAW in August 2010, going live with AT&T Wireless.  Recent progress has been brisk, and the announcement of 10 countries rolled our already demostrated Bango’s progress over the past year.

With BBAW deployed in 131 markets world-wide, there is still a huge opportunity for further carrier billing activity, and Bango is working hard to deliver this as fast as possible to generate more sales for Blackberry App World vendors and to improve the user experience on Blackberry devices.

Bango provides operator billing for the mobile digital bookshop enabling book-lovers worldwide to quickly and easily pay for eBooks and place the charge on their phone bill.

“By using Bango to deliver a consistent operator payment experience to all our customers we have seen a marked increase in sales. Conversion rates using operator billing are much higher than using other methods, and easier for our consumers”, said Stephen Crawford, Operations Director at Mobcast. “Over 50% of our customers read with their Android phone and an increasing number are using Wi-Fi for the faster connection speeds on offer – they can now buy the same way as everyone else. 75% of our customers choose operator billing through Bango, and no other billing solution lets our smartphone customers simply click-to-pay without additional registration.”

Read our full industry release here

Click here to order a printed copy of the Bango 2011 Annual Report.

The Company’s AGM will be held at 2pm on Monday 19th September 2011 at the offices of Threadneedle Communications, Aldermary House, 10-15 Queen Street, London, EC1N 1TX.

View the 2011 AGM notice, 2011 AGM notice Explanatory notes

App Stores enable the download of free apps or “paid for” apps. Bango gets a small share of revenues from each payment transaction, so it is important to get some idea of the scale of the opportunity to see what returns might be available from this market, and important area for Bango in the coming years.

Vendors are highly secretive of the sales of Apps though their app stores. Apple, Nokia, Blackberry, Google, Amazon and many others have so far not revealed any financial details.  However, independent analysts have started to investigate the market, and are starting to publish their estimates.

iSuppli has recently pubplished its 2010 numbers  and there is a useful breakdown by vendor here at BGR

Bango will be preparing a roundup of some of the numbers, with a commentary later this year.

Mastercard/Nokia Visa Isis(Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile/Discover) Sprint  Google PayPal

Mobile Wallets enable users to store financial credentials – like credit card details, bank account access codes and potentially some “stored value”.  Just like a real wallet might hold your credit cards, a secretly scribbled password for your bank account, and some cash.

Unlike a real wallet, your mobile  wallet can connect to the internet – possibly helping with security, and thru technologies like bar codes, cameras, accelerometers, and NFC it is possible for the wallet to reveal its contents and authenticate to a “merchant” without having to use a swipe card or chip and pin.

Bango enables mobile web pages or downloaded apps to collect payment from users – normally through their mobile operator (who then collects the payment) or a credit or debit card.

Bango has already integrated into the PayPal mobile wallet, which is starting to become more popular.  In the same way, a wallet holding credit cards, bank access credentials or a pre-pay can also be accessed by Bango – through the phone.  The app or website using Bango does not have to integrate into all the different possible mobile wallet standards (at our last count there were at least 38) or find out which wallet the user has, they can leave all that to Bango.  Bango can identify the available wallet, and connect to the most popular wallets – collecting payments. Just like Bango does with 50+ carrier billing systems.

So, if wallets become more popular, and are able to support apps and web access, Bango and Bango customers will be able to benefit.

Bango expects that wallets will continue to be in relatively small niches initially, until more standards develop. The technology – NFC, barcode, bumping, bluetooth etc. – will evolve at the same time.  Bango expects that within 5-6 years, most mobiles will be “NFC equipped” and therefore able to easily replace smartcards such as Oyster – driving mass adoption.

In Japan, the adoption of mobile wallets is more advanced – primarily because the largest mobile phone company – DoCoMo has been driving this for many years.  There is a great video about the “FELICA” system here.