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Bango enables off-deck mobile credit card payments

Bango has launched Bango Credit Card Payment to help businesses and individuals charge mobile phone users for their digital content and applications worldwide.

By integrating Bango Credit Card Payment into their mobile Web site for $9.99 per month, businesses can get an off-deck way to bill their mobile customers without having to sign a separate deal with each carrier.

"We started to notice that with high-end devices, we're seeing more and more consumers elect to pay for mobile products and services via credit card, especially BlackBerry users, because they don't go through carrier connections, they go throu, gh RIM data connections," said Anil Malhotra, New York-based senior vice president of alliances and marketing for Bango.

"The goal is getting more people into the mobile payments market, because to get a service letting consumers pay via their phone bill, it's complicated carrier-by-carrier process," he said. "A lot of businesses need a lower barrier to entry in the market, and they need to be able to do something very simple, try out a mobile service offer and set up a model for billing the user.

"We're saying to wider market, ?For about $10 a month, you can launch a mobile service, and once you've established a viable model, we can upgrade you to carrier building."

With the current rise in smartphone users, a lot of businesses who have never considered mobile before are now looking at how they can capture revenue from this new market.

And many of these smartphone users, such as those with a Blackberry or Google phone, are used to using the Web on their phones and are familiar with credit card services.

With Bango, anyone can offer credit card payment to their mobile visitors and refine their product offer, pricing and consumer experience, with the flexibility to upgrade to carrier billing through Bango when they are ready.

Bango Credit Card Payment brings the familiarity of online credit/debit card payments to mobile, using a flow that eliminates unnecessary steps for the user, such as entering card type and full billing address.

This speeds up purchases, leading to more successful transactions across all mobile devices, according to Bango.

Using a network of credit card processors, Bango collects payments worldwide in multiple currencies and languages, from all handsets, networks and mobile Internet connections.

Bango Credit Card Payment offers single-click checkout after the first purchase.

As Bango knows the preferences of millions of consumers across many merchants, this increases the availability of this fast payment feature being offered, even if the merchant has never sold to that person before.

"One-click mobile payments could potentially make a significant difference for mobile advertising, because the more seamless you can make the journey the better," Mr. Malhotra said. "However, as far as the mobile world of payments that have come out of the use of premium text messages to charge consumers, anything that requires messaging disrupts the flow of the browse-and -buy experience.

"We provide mobile payments via carrier-enabled WAP payments and this off-deck browse-and-buy credit card billing," he said.