In an interesting Forbes article, published this month, Bango is called-out as a pioneer of a new type of economy.
The Forbes article interviews the journalist and author Haydn Shaughnessy, who recently published “Shift: A User’s Guide to the New Economy”. In the interview in Forbes, Shaughnessy comments:
“[An] interesting exemplar company is Bango PLC. It facilitates carrier billing. To do carrier billing in the app store, you have to be able to turn something like Google’s app store on in nearly 100 countries, with eventually several hundred telecom carriers. Carrier billing can be a lot less frictional as a means of buying things online than say credit cards. When Bango turns on carrier billing for Google, you see an increase in sales, anything from threefold to tenfold. Suddenly shopping is a whole lot easier. They get their transaction on their mobile phone bill.
Twenty years ago, we said the next banks would be the telcos. In Africa, the next banks are already the telcos. In China, the next banks are Alibaba [BABA] and TenCent Holdings.
The reality is that communication devices can replace banking systems and they are doing it. Bango takes friction out of the whole process of turning carrier billing on. They employ around 70 people, yet they service 100 carriers around the world.”
Shaughnessy’s focus on companies where it is the technology platform and user network that enable global scale, instead of traditional businesses that require more people and more capital to support growth. Similarly, he draws attention to WordPress, which the eagle-eyed reader will spot also hosts this blog post. WordPress employs around 200 people in order to support 23%, of the world’s websites. As Shaughnessy points out, “they are sustaining the global web with just 200 people”.
We at Bango have built the mobile payment platform that’s fuelling the global growth in digital content sales. The platform is being used by the giants of mobile, Amazon, Samsung, Google and others, uniting app stores and mobile operators with their customers and enabling the carrier billing market to reach massive scale. What Shaughnessy has caught onto is that the online economy has been built on such platforms – think eBay, Facebook, Google, Amazon – and that these companies, like Bango, can operate at global scale with few traditional resources (people, equipment) by using smart technology instead.
The Bango Payment Platform already reaches more than one billion consumers, is growing rapidly, and most of our growth is ahead of us. As the next billion consumers pick up their first smartphone, Bango will be there to unlock the universe of apps, video, games and other content that brings our smartphones to life.
We recognize the new economy that Haydn Shaughnessy describes and we’re delighted to be spotted as an “exemplar” for how technology platforms can enable relatively few people to create new businesses on a global scale.