Global Partnership with Telef?nica

RNS Number : 7374V

Bango PLC

17 January 2013

 



17 January 2013

BANGO PLC

("Bango" or "the Company")

Bango and Telefónica announce global mobile payments partnership with Telefónica

Cambridge and Madrid - Bango (AIM: BGO), the mobile payments and analytics company, and Telefónica Digital today announce that they have signed a Global Framework Agreement. The two companies will partner globally to create an enhanced direct-to-bill payment experience for mobile app stores. The partnership will combine Bango's frictionless payment experience with Telefónica's BlueVia Payment APIs (Application Programming Interface), which will connect over 350 million chargeable customers worldwide through the Bango Payments Platform.

BlueVia is the global platform from Telefónica that helps developers take apps, web services and ideas to market, making it easy for app developers to access Telefónica's network APIs, global communications infrastructure and 314 million subscribers. A key element of BlueVia is its operator billing functionality, allowing users to bill the cost of a purchase to their phone bill in one-click.

By integrating the single BlueVia billing API into the Bango Payments Platform, app stores will benefit from Bango's enhanced user experience for mobile devices, which is designed to generate higher payment conversion rates, especially from Wi-Fi-connected and other "off-network" devices. This is particularly important for the future of mobile payments as more than half of smartphones browsing app stores use Wi-Fi connections.

As well as technology to improve the user experience, Bango is contributing to the partnership its market-leading expertise in managing payments at mass scale, developed over several years with industry-leading partners such as RIM, Facebook, Opera and others. The Bango platform expands the attractiveness of operator billing to third parties by automating all settlement processes, including tax reconciliation, local currency support and providing sophisticated analytics and reporting that enable app stores to optimize the mobile user experience.

The ability to pay for digital goods and services via a mobile phone bill or prepay credit is a key way for content owners and developers to fully monetize their products. This is especially the case in developing markets, such as Latin America, where penetration of bank accounts and credit cards is very low. Trials of direct to bill in Telefónica operating businesses have proven its ability to drive sales. Where Bango has introduced operator billing to developed markets with high credit card penetration, sales of digital goods have routinely increased by 300% to 400%.

Bango CEO Ray Anderson commented, "Telefónica and Bango share a strategic vision: to widen access to paid content by standardizing and simplifying operator-billed mobile payments. BlueVia is a bold and valuable initiative by Telefónica to establish a unified set of billing APIs. We will standardize on BlueVia to connect with Telefónica's 300 million subscribers around the world and look forward to welcoming other operators who join this initiative, as Telenor has done."

Telefónica Digital, Head of BlueVia Jose Valles said, "At the heart of every great service is first class customer experience and both Bango and BlueVia share the vision that mobile payments must be seamless and low friction for the customer. Through this partnership, we are delivering a mobile billing ecosystem that empowers the app store and content owners to achieve mass scale in their business through global reach and a payment method far broader than credit cards."

Contact Details:

Bango plc	Newgate Threadneedle	Cenkos Securities plc
Tel. [phone] www.bango.com	Tel. [phone]	Tel. [phone]
Ray Anderson, CEO	Caroline Evans-Jones	Ken Fleming
Gerry Tucker, CFO	Fiona Conroy	Neil McDonald

About Bango

In the era of mobile technology, collecting payments has emerged as a central and complex challenge. Bango (AIM: BGO) powers payment and analytics on the mobile web, providing users with a massively smooth payment experience.

Bango's pervasive presence across the web creates a platform effect for partners, identifying hundreds of millions of users and maximizing the number of one-click payments. Global leaders plug into Bango: customers include Facebook, BlackBerry App World, Windows Phone Store, Amazon and major mobile brands including CNN, Cartoon Network and EA Mobile. Visit: bango.com

About Telefónica Digital

Telefónica Digital is a global business division of Telefónica. Its mission is to seize the opportunities within the digital world and deliver new growth for Telefónica through research & development, venture capital, global partnerships and digital services such as cloud computing, mobile advertising, M2M and eHealth. It is also driving innovation in over the top communications under a new umbrella brand called TU and in Big Data through Telefónica Dynamic Insights.

Telefónica Digital will deliver these new products and services to Telefónica's 314 million customers as well as entering new markets. It is headquartered in London with regional centres in Silicon Valley, Sao Paulo, Spain and Tel Aviv. Jajah, TokBox, Terra, Media Networks Latin America, 48 and giffgaff are all managed under the Telefónica Digital umbrella.

To sign up for news alerts and read commentary on Telefónica Digital, visit www.telefonica.com/digitalhub  and track them on Twitter @tefdigital

 

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