Ray Anderson, CEO and Founder
Ray is Chief Executive of Bango, he co-founded Bango in 1999 when he realized that the convergence of the internet with the ubiquity of mobile phones would open up huge opportunities. Ray wanted to create a platform that would streamline the process of collecting payments from mobile users for content and service providers. Ray positioned Bango to benefit from the opening up of the mobile operator portals in 2004, and the transition of the mobile content business from a traditional SMS messaging model to a customer friendly browse and buy internet model.
In 2005, Ray led the successful floatation of the company. Bango then became the first company to open up single-click mobile web billing on US networks AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile. As smartphones became increasingly important, Ray's obsession with user experience excellence and building a stable and ubiquitous platform helped Bango secure strategic relationships with BlackBerry, Opera and Facebook. Ray continues to build and steer the Bango team forward into one of the most exciting markets in history.
In 1988, Ray established IXI which created the industry standard network GUI - X.desktop. IXI was an early leader in the creation of the web. It sponsored the first ever WWW conference at CERN and shipped the world's first commercial web browser. In 1993 the company merged with SCO and then floated on NASDAQ. Ray held senior executive roles in SCO, including General Manager, Senior VP Marketing, and Senior VP of New Ventures. He played a key role in transforming SCO from being a small "PC Unix" company to it becoming the industry standard Intel Unix provider and its acquisition of Unix Assets from Novell by the time Ray left in 1999.
Before IXI Ray was a Co-founder and Development Director of Torch Computers where he sold its graphical user interface software "OpenTop" to Steve Jobs during the start-up of his NeXT company. Before that he developed operating system software for Acorn Computers, optimizing compilers for GEC Computers, and worked for Sinclair Research.
Ray is an entrepreneur, innovator and investor with 20 years experience. He was named "Technology Entrepreneur of the Year" in February 2006, and in September 2006 at the ME Awards was given a special award for outstanding contribution to the mobile entertainment industry. A member of "The Cambridge Angels", Ray was a founding investor in a variety of growing companies including TeamStudio, Tenison Technology, Electronic Share Information (sold to E*Trade), Aspective, Trigenix (sold to Qualcomm), RE5ULT (82ASK), Shortfuze, Midentity and other technology businesses.
He holds a 1st Class Degree in Computer Science from Cambridge University. He is a keen pilot.
Anil Malhotra, CMO and Founder
Anil Malhotra is CMO and co-founder of Bango. He has responsibility for all of Bango's marketing activities and its strategic alliances with major partners, including device makers, app store providers and global network operators. He has extensive experience of creating successful partnerships between fast moving technology innovators and major market players in online content and connected devices.
Anil took Bango's original business plan to operators and created a sequence of partnerships to build a global mobile payments platform. The Bango Platform is now supported by nearly 100 operators in every region of the world, enabling over 1 billion customers to pay for content with their mobile phone account. He has worked alongside industry associations and regulators in several major markets to ensure that appropriate standards are developed and adopted in support of mobile payments. In anticipation of the shift from messaging-based content to the internet, he developed and promoted the original mobile web best practice guidelines that form part of the US market standards.
Anil has developed Bango's relationships with the leading internet providers of mobile content and services, including Facebook, Google, Amazon and BlackBerry. He is currently working with many of these players to standardize an open, industry-wide payments platform that supports all ways of paying for content and services from every device.
Before co-founding Bango, Anil worked on the development of major partnerships for one of Europe's leading computer games technology developers, which resulted in the licensing of the company’s 'artificial life' technology by the world's leading games publishers. Before that he worked with Bango CEO Ray Anderson to establish a technology called X.desktop, again as a global standard, this time for the user interface on networked computers. He began his career in product marketing at one of Europe's first ever Apple Macintosh value added resellers.
Anil holds a Diploma in English Literature from the University of Cambridge, a Bachelor of Sciences degree in Psychology from the University of Wales, and a Master of Sciences degree in Computer Science from the University of Essex.
David Keeling, COO
David is responsible for service delivery, global operations and account management. He provides leadership, direction and policy guidance to the proven operations, security and customer service teams, aligning them to the demands of all Bango customers.
David brings a fifteen year career in service delivery to Bango, with particular success in fast-growth technology companies, more recently at mobile messaging leader Acision, where David led the transformation of the operations function building a number of global services centres. His career in Acision culminated in five years leading its global customer service and professional services organisation, enabling 300 clients to serve over one and a half billion customers in 135 countries.
He was a member of the M&A team, and brings extensive experience of alternative sourcing strategies.
David has a keen interest in the development and evolution of customer support and professional services, and presented at SSPA industry conference “Going Global”. He has previously been a visiting lecturer in Project Management methodologies Plymouth University. David holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Management studies from Middlesex University.
Gerry Tucker, CFO
Gerry is a key voice in the development and implementation of Bango's strategic plan. He is responsible for reporting to Bango's management team, board and shareholders and is further responsible for all financial elements of the company's commercial relationships
Gerry is a seasoned finance leader with an excellent track record. His career to date encompasses roles across several different market sectors, and in his most recent role he was acting CFO and Senior Financial Analyst for PLUS Markets Group, a London Stock Exchange AIM-listed UK company. He has held a number of senior financial and operational roles with companies ranging from pre-revenue start-up, to large multi-nationals. These companies include; Vodafone, where he documented and analysed processes throughout their business; Take Two (and Rockstar), the publishers of 'Grand Theft Auto' and; Activision, publishers of 'Guitar Hero'.
He has considerable experience in start-ups, where he took a firm from start-up to £300 million in five years, as well as expertise in mergers and acquisitions, product launches and financial modelling.
Glenn Walker, CTO
Glenn is responsible for the technical development and delivery of products at Bango, working with Product Marketing and Sales to create and enhance the company's product proposition. He leads the technical direction and management of the development teams at Bango.
Glenn joined Bango in 2005 and contributed his extensive experience of financial systems design and enterprise grade architectures to the evolution of the Bango platform as transaction volumes increased. Glenn was architect of the Bango Analytics product, which enables customer's to analyze their mobile sites in real-time, leveraging the in-depth data and relationships which Bango has in the mobile space.
Prior to working at Bango, Glenn was Head of Development at Moneyfacts Group plc. Moneyfacts were the innovators of financial product comparison sites, compiling national data from all of the UK's Banks and Building Societies on credit cards, mortgages, personal loans, savings and more. He was involved in key projects such as Mortgage Comparison software, which was used in every UK branch of HSBC, as well as supplying data and analysis services to Virgin Money.
He is also a keen private pilot, and owns his own aircraft based at Old Buckenham, Norfolk.
Soreya Senior, HR
Soreya is a member of the Bango Leadership Team, working to drive Bango strategy and develop Bango employees. Soreya is responsible for change management, talent and performance management, recruitment and all employee relations, staff engagement and internal communications. Soreya is also a member of the Infosec team working to ensure security and compliance for the organization.
Soreya is a CIPD qualified HR professional who has worked for over 15 years in various Cambridge technology and biotechnology companies.
Martin Harris, SVP Strategic Accounts
As SVP Strategic Accounts, Martin is responsible for managing the long term relationships with Bango's key customers in the USA, Europe and Asia Pacific regions. Working with global app stores, online publishers and network operators his role covers business planning and strategic sales. His 11 years experience in the mobile industry and wealth of knowledge in the mobile content and payments space means he often speaks at industry events.
Previously, as Sales Director at iii.co.uk (Interactive Investor International plc) Martin helped drive the company to a leading market position and through a subsequent IPO in February 2000. Martin spent 12 months with AT&T Labs, heading global new technology sales. Before that, he was at Sun Microsystems for 10 years in sales and sales management positions where he was one of Sun's most successful European salesmen. He has also held senior roles at NCR and Torch Computers in the USA and Canada.
Tim Moss, CDO
Tim is an expert in the field of high volume, database backed content management systems as used by mobile operators and news portals, with many years of experience in internet businesses offering internet based services and products. Tim's primary role is to lead the team that ensures Bango's datacentres and databases provide high levels of availability and performance for all of Bango's customers, according to the service level agreements. He is also responsible directly to the CEO for safeguarding the privacy and integrity of all customer and end user data, and for ensuring the implementation of Bango privacy and security policies.
Prior to working at Bango, Tim was Chief Technical Architect at Sportal International, who ran Europe's leading and award winning sports news portal, where he helped them take traffic from 1M pages per month to 1.5M pages per hour, from over 2.5M unique sports fans. Tim previously developed the systems underpinning financial products used by Tier 1 investment banks, where high systems availability, security and auditability was crucial.
Tim has a background in software product development and systems administration and architecture, holding positions at blue-chip organisations such as IBM, O2 and SCO, he has a degree in Software Engineering from Edinburgh University.
Andy Bovingdon, VP Product Marketing
Andy has a real passion for technology, especially anything mobile or web related. At Bango he leads the company's product strategy and is responsible for the interface between products and markets; considering product proposition, requirements, roadmaps, positioning, communication and promotion. He works closely with top brands, mobile leaders and end users to ensure the Bango Payment and Analytics products remain at the forefront of innovation.
Andy has 20 years experience within the global internet market, working for both start-ups and established brands in Europe and the USA. He has been active with the World Wide Web from its inception and was involved in the first web conference, at CERN in 1994. Andy integrated a wide range of web technologies into the X-desktop product range for IXI Ltd; he introduced the world to the web-based Desktop (Webtop) at SCO; and designed the first web-based remote application access solutions for Tarantella Inc., allowing mobile workforces to use mission critical applications from centrally located Unix, Linux and Windows servers over the Internet.
Before joining Bango, Andy was Head of Marketing and Product Management for ANT plc, the leading supplier of web-based user interface platforms for the IPTV market. Prior to that, he was responsible for worldwide marketing at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. Andy holds a BSc in Computer Science from Staffordshire University.
Karen Oakley, VP Payment Integrations
As VP Payment Integrations Karen is responsible for leading the integration of new payment connections in to the Bango Payment Platform. Karen manages the integration of operator billing including launch and post-launch activities, the qualification of new markets and payment connections, financial and legal due diligence and contract negotiation. She evaluates and optimizes the execution of new payment integrations.
Karen has over 20 years experience in managing operations in the High-Tech sector. Formerly with IXI, Karen managed the finance and operations from start up to $11m. After IXI's merger with SCO, she was responsible for Human Resources, Operations, Financial Control and Management Accounting for two SCO development sites. She has an MBA, a post graduate diploma in Management and is AAT qualified.
Marc Saulino, VP Sales
As Vice President of Sales, Marc manages commercial relationships between Bango and their strategic clients on a global basis. In addition to sales and strategic contract negotiations, Marc brings considerable expertise in the fields of operations, product development, mobile advertising and marketing.
A leader in mobile payment and analytics, Marc has spent more than a decade in the commercial and marketing sector, principally within the mobile industry. At a time when mobile web payments was in its infancy, Marc worked alongside the industry's leading content aggregators such us Sony, EA, Gameloft and others to develop pioneering monetization strategies, driving mobile traffic and mobile operator compliance. Marc is particularly engaged in the user identification challenges presented by the shift to mobile, and has helped dozens of leading media companies to meet their mobile analytics goals.
Marc originally joined Bango in 2006 in a business development capacity. Following a period as VP of Business Development for the mobile payment startup Billing Revolution (now Buck), during which he oversaw the company's initial growth phase, Marc rejoined Bango in 2010 to take up his current position.
Jim Plimmer, VP Account Management
Jim Plimmer is VP of Account Management at Bango. In this role he leads a team of dedicated Technical Sales Managers. He has primary responsibility for the support and leadership of all key accounts and customer relationships.
Jim has over 15 years experience in product design, marketing and relationship management in the ICT market. At the start of his career, Jim had a fast track journey from graduate programmer to Engineering and Marketing Director at Telsis, an innovative and fast-growing company providing telephony applications to the world's leading telecoms companies.
This position led naturally into a successful career supporting strategic accounts, most prominently Vodafone, Telefonica and Orange/France Telecom Group companies. Prior to Bango, Jim was Chief Technology Officer for Europe and Russia at Acision, the global leader in mobile messaging. In this role, Jim delivered leadership and direction to the regional team for over 100 mobile network operators (MNO's) across data, messaging and charging solutions. As a result, Jim has a sophisticated and detailed knowledge of the global MNO space.
Jim has a natural understanding of the importance of customer relationships, technology and in executing customer focus and management strategies, enabling him to strengthen Bango's focus on existing customers.