Bango blueprint signposts hundreds of millions in new revenues

Mobile commerce company Bango, which handles carrier billing for some of the world’s top technology enterprises, is becoming a global megastar in its own right.

The Cambridge business underlined its credentials at a strategy day that sent its share price skywards and lit the touchpaper to a period of unprecedented growth.

CEO Paul Larbey revealed: “Looking further into the future, we are on a clear journey from the tens of millions of dollars of revenue we generate today to generating hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue in the future.”

The Bango blueprint makes impressive reading. The company has generated a 52 per cent revenue CAGR over the past five years alone. In addition, Bango’s transactional business and platform licence business will continue to grow at >95 per cent margin.  

The Bango platform has enabled the business to grow its market share from just two per cent in 2016 to 10 per cent today. During that time Bango has also diversified its revenue stream from transactional payment processing to now include platform licensing and data monetisation. 

These latter two are incremental revenue streams and will supercharge growth over the coming years.

Larbey says growth in the Platform Licensing business is especially key. “We have already announced deals with Verizon & BT; there is one other that we hope to name in due course, as well as two outside the top 30 we haven’t been able to name. 

“From these five early wins, we estimate $7 million of annual recurring revenue by 2023. What’s more, there is a strong pipeline of deals coming through as telcos increasingly look to standardise on the Bango Platform. 

“Not only are we converting our payments and subscription bundling partners onto platform licenses, we are also discussing licenses with telcos we have no prior relationship with which is really exciting and demonstrates the power of our platform.

“Bango Marketplace is another key area of growth. The opportunity here is vast and we expect Marketplace to outsize our Payments business in time. We are still early in Marketplace’s journey, with it only completing its first full year of trading last year, but the growth is powerful. 

“We’ve seen 20x growth in the number of app developers to 4,000 in June 2021 – a number we believe we can easily scale to around 50,000 app developers. 

“We highlighted growth in ad spend of 187 per cent from June to September 2021, which reflects the success of Bango Audiences. With good initial growth, there is still significant headroom to expand. 

“We are targeting 500 large app developers as key accounts with six on board already generating >$100k/year each; it’s easy to see how this business can scale quickly.

“Looking further into the future, we are on a clear journey from the tens of millions of dollars of revenue we generate today to generating hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue in the future.

“We can also expand each of our three business areas beyond the opportunity we are focused today: Out of app store billing for our transactional business; looking beyond telcos to energy providers etc with our platform licenses; and promoting the use of Bango Audiences to marketers outside the app developer space.” 

The world’s largest online merchants – including Nasdaq trio Amazon, Google and Microsoft – use Bango technology to acquire more paying users. 

Bango has developed unique purchase behaviour technology that enables millions more users to buy the products and services they want, using innovative methods of payment including carrier billing, digital wallets and subscription bundling. 

It harnesses this purchase activity into valuable marketing segments, called Bango Audiences. Merchants use these audiences to target their marketing at paying customers based on their purchase behaviour. 

Better targeting is shown to increase spend through the Bango payments business – in turn generating more data insights, creating a powerful virtuous circle that drives continuous growth.

The company has bolstered its senior team to help underpin the new spurt of expansion, adding two exceptional non-executive directors to a hand already stacked with aces – Marcus Weldon (ex Nokia CTO and Bell Labs President) and Lisa Gansky, formerly with AOL and Kodak. 

Larbey says: “Both have the entrepreneurial and innovative approach to help us continue to grow. They are also both based in the US – adding more international strength to the board.”