The recent announcement of a deal between NHN and Bango caused a lot of interest among app developers and payment providers – especially in Korea.

This post is to help explain the commercial and strategic benefits to Bango shareholders.

The Bango virtuous circle strategy is a unique and powerful one: Use the data collected during payment processing to drive marketing efficiency and therefore accelerated growth for merchants which in turn  generates more payments.

Hundreds of millions of dollars of payment requests flow through into the Bango platform. Provided the Bango payment partner – such as a mobile operator – has consent to allow that data to be used  to improve user experience by better targeting of marketing, Bango uses its technology to generates audiences of paying users that are offered to app developers via Bango Marketplace.

The partner shares the data revenues and the user of the audiences get upto 9x more effective marketing – driving faster revenue growth. A thriving ecosystem gets stronger.

At the Bango Strategy day in January 2019, Bango explained how the Bango platform is not restricted to Direct Carrier Billing payment data. It already processes wallet payments in Japan and elsewhere, and also can potentially accept payment data from other payment processors to process and then offer through Bango Marketplace.

This is the first announcement with a partner that has data from apps where payment is with the user’s credit card. A user with a history of in-app spending using a credit card or DCB is definitely a more valuable user to an app developer than a user who has an unknown payment history.  That’s why NHN ACE and Bango expect app developer/marketer interest in Bango Audiences that are created by Bango using NHN ACE data.

Think of the new data partnership as a way to add fuel to the data monetization part of the virtuous circle, which drives more merchant marketing and then more payment volume that is processed by Bango directly or by other methods.

 

A win for everybody in the Bango circle: Merchants, Payment Partners, Users and Bango.

The news has been well received in Korea.
For example here and here