Bango's half-year saw 138% growth

Flying colours for first half of 2018

Bango’s first-half performance in 2018 saw 138 per cent growth as end user spend (EUS) rose to £220million, which helped generate a 54 per cent rise in group revenue.

Co-founder and chief marketing officer Anil Malhotra was delighted: “It’s a very good set of results for the first six months of 2018,” he told the Cambridge Independent. “Our consumer spend for the whole of 2017 was £271million, so this shows how well we’re doing, with the first half of this year alone generating revenues of £220m.”

Bango’s 2018 success is based on its back-office financial service to online platforms including Google, Samsung and Amazon. Developments in Japan, plus progress with Google, especially on android, have driven the growth.

The firm also acquired Audiens, an Italian data management specialist, in January.

“Bango has a lot of data on trends – how people buy, how often, where and so on,” says Anil of the strategy behind the acquisition. “That includes what they buy – games, music, or live sports, for instance – and this is very interesting data for companies looking to promote their services on the internet. So Bango can help firms who ask us ‘How do I sell this in India?’, and we came across a very nice platform and, rather than produce the data sets ourselves, we bought Audiens in January – we paid 3m euros.

“The figures for Audiens’ first six months has fed into the figures, but no synergy with Bango has come through yet, that will come later,” said Anil, referring to the fact that Audiens’ full service capability has yet to be fully linked across all Bango’s platforms.

More and more use is being made of direct-to-mobile billing, where the customer payment is added directly to the phone bill, bypassing credit cards. Again, Bango handles all these payments. The firm remains content-neutral.

“Our synergy means we work with big brands such as Microsoft, Google, Samsung and Amazon, but the other beneficiary is the mobile network operators such as 3 and O2. They like Bango as we bring them additional revenue, and the stores like Bango as we help them add new customers.”

Bango also added music streaming service Pandora, which is US-based, as a customer in the first half of the year. The firm’s 2017 revenues were $1.3billion.

“In the last four years our EUS has doubled, now it’s more than doubled,” concludes Anil. “The core payments business is already operating on a cash-flow positive basis.”