The virtuous circle strategy continues to deliver: Bango has deployed and operates a secure, trusted, global mobile commerce platform. With strong synergies between mobile payments and data monetization, the Bango strategy creates (an iterative) virtuous circle. Increasing the subscriber base generates greater payment volumes. This generates more payment data, which merchants can use to market more effectively, which then attracts more paying customers. With the key End User Spend (“EUS”) metric reaching £1.1bn in 2019, having doubled in each of the past five years, we believe there is solid evidence that the virtuous circle strategy continues to deliver. 

Monetising the data mountain: The Bango Platform generates payment insights from across millions of paying customers. By allowing clients to target marketing activities at high-value customers, Bango Audiences have been shown to deliver up to 9x improvement on the effectiveness of app-developer marketing results. It also generates additional revenue streams for ARPU hungry Mobile Network Operators (“MNOs”). Data revenues now contribute a quarter of group turnover (FY 2019), in our view demonstrating management’s ability to capture emerging growth opportunities in the segment. 

Platform expansion expected to drive further growth: In our view commentary delivered at the 2020 Strategy Day reassures on the group’s ability to deliver its growth targets. To paraphrase Executive Chair Ray Anderson – “The more participants that use a platform, the more valuable it becomes.” The combination of 1) growth in end-users, 2) new payment routes, 3) more merchants joining the platform and 4) increased volumes of customer insight data have driven impressive growth in the business over the past five years. With the platform seeing increasing momentum in all four growth drivers and highlighting our expectation that EUS will double once again in 2020, we continue to believe that Bango’s growth prospects remain bright.