Bango launches first mobile one-click billing with Microsoft

Mobile web payments developer Bango and Microsoft have together launched Bango's direct operator billing on the Windows Phone.Bango also revealed that daily end user spend for the first half of the financial year was now expected to be double the end user spend for the previous six months.Users of Microsoft's Windows Phone Store in Indonesia, a country with the largest smartphone market across all of South East Asia, using the Indosat network will now be able to use Bango's one-click direct operator billing to purchase digital content.Bango said that its payments service had enabled an increase of "300%-400%" in the sales of digital goods in developed markets and "in the range of 1,000%" in emerging markets. It added that Microsoft recognising this impact and had was implementing "a gradual expansion of operator billing in the Windows Phone Store".Bango said it continued to work with Microsoft to expand operator billing in the Windows Phone Store and "expects to announce further progress in the coming months" but believed it was too early to accurately forecast potential sales. Chief Executive Officer Ray Anderson said the launch was strategically important as it marked Bango's first integration with Microsoft. He added that the company had continued to make progress in establishing itself as the industry mobile billing "platform of choice" and was experiencing "a high level of interest from operators in markets where other payments methods are scarce"."Significant growth is being seen across the payments platform as well as the analytics product. Daily end user spend for H1 2013 is expected to be double the end user spend for the previous six months, driven by Blackberry, Google, Facebook and now Microsoft. "We look forward to rolling out these live services which are currently in their early stages into other geographies, and also launching with currently non-live partners in due course." Bango recently announced it had reached 110 mobile operator connections globally, and a reach of more than 1bn mobile subscribers. Shares in Bango were up 2.5% at 185p at 13:15 on Thursday.OH Bango