Bango boost as online spending platforms boom
Bango has published a tremendous set of 2019 figures – and is enjoying a huge hike in growth in 2020 as people spend more time online.
Sales for the payments platform’s services - its customers are the world’s popular online platforms including Amazon, Google and Microsoft - grew 41 per cent year-on-year to £9.3million, driven by end user spending doubling once again, all driven through Bango’s payments portals.
“This is the fifth consecutive year of doubling revenue,” CEO Paul Larbey said, noting that Bango has expanded its services base to include a cable TV company in 2019 and, this year, a so-far-unnamed retail organisation.
“We have a very stable cost base, have seen transactions double, and we’ve improved the platform.”
Bango added Bango Marketplace to the mix a year ago. It offers app developers a chance to test their app - it could be a new app, or an upgrade to an existing app - online with real users and real customers.
“The focus is on app developers and Marketplace allows them to improve their platforms - such as Facebook - to improve growth,” Paul says. “A lot of it is making games - there’s no cost of sales, it’s all pure revenue for them. We can share an anonymised audience so the the app developers can target their app at people with a propensity to pay, including making the first payment.”
Perhaps most exciting is that Westbrook Centre-based Bango, co-founded by Ray Anderson in 1999, has its online payments services embedded in Hatch, a US-based 5G games streaming platform.
“5G means new services,” explained Paul. “It offers low latency and high bandwidth. The launch of the Hatch carrier billing service was announced this morning (March 17). The Hatch service is subscription-based, it’s a purely 5G games streaming company. The carrier billing for the Hatch service is subscription-based so it”s big in value, but also very predictable.”
“It’s a global platform. The main 5G markets are in South Korea, Japan, Europe and the US. We’ll see more and more services in 5G. 2020 looks to be very exciting for Bango.”
Paul notes that coronavirus has not impacted the business geometry as online trading has been unaffected - quite the contrary, digital shopping has reached new peaks of activity.
“Obviously, with Covid-19, we’re in uncharted waters and the safety of our employees, customers and partners is the most important thing, but we are digital, we have no supply lines and need no funding, so we’re not expecting any operational impact.
“We have offices all over the world, and in Milan they’ve been working remotely for some time - and the same goes for Seoul and Tokyo. We are all fully capable of working remotely.”
The global pandemic has radically altered the daily lives of billions of people - and left them with more time to be online.
“All companies are reporting an increase in streaming and much more spend through online commerce platforms,” says Paul. “Bango supports a wide range of services, so for instance food deliveries in Japan via Amazon Fresh - digital spend is increasing rapidly.”
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