After announcing a partnership with Facebook in February and seeing its share price shoot up as a result (see here), Bango, the Cambridge-based mobile payments and analytics player, has now finished the integration work and gone live with the social networking giant in Germany, the UK and the US. Over the rest of the year Bango will expand the service to other Facebook countries. Bango’s shares went up over 5% on the news as investors made bets on revenue now coming on stream. Bango's shares are up 127% year to date, even despite revenue heading south and losses widening so far this year (see Bango yet to deliver the big bang).
Bango’s technology is designed to bypass other mobile payment channels such as premium SMS messages or credit cards. Rather customers are able to use operator billing, paying on their phone, and without the need to register personal details. Bango sees this approach 'maximising' the potential for single-click payments. We'd certainly agree that making mobile payments easier is going to help increase spend.
Apparently Bango’s platform delivers an average conversion rate of 77% (i.e. those customers that click ‘buy’, and do actually buy), compared to 40% via conventional operator billing. Consequently, there should be greater revenue opportunities using Bango’s systems. We assume that Bango will take a cut of each payment transaction. So in theory, if consumers increase their spending significantly via the likes of Facebook, Bango could do very well.