With businesses looking to maximize their earning potential from selling mobile content and services, Bango is warning them to look beyond the published headline rates presented by their billing providers.
While industry payout rates are on the increase, the other important question is what the conversion rate is likely to be, says Anil Malhotra, SVP of Marketing and Alliances at Bango. There are significant variations in the quality of service that billing providers deliver. Mobile content businesses switching suppliers can achieve up to a 6% immediate increase in revenues.
To ensure maximum return, Bango advises mobile content businesses to look beyond the headlines. A good place to start, it says, is the provider's pedigree in mobile web billing. It says that businesses should ask how many existing clients already use WAP billing and also ask about the type of billing relationships the provider has with operators. Then closely examine the billing flow, from the customer's point of view.
The high conversion rates we have seen from the Bango billing system have really helped us to build our Ringtones.com service, said Simon Buckingham, CEO of Mobile Streams. We are reaping the rewards of Bango's long experience in WAP billing by providing a fast single-bill billing flow for our customers.
Bango says that over eight rate increases were delivered to its customers in the last 12 months, with a top rate of 87% for on-bill payment in the UK. You can see a list of payout rates in different countries here.
Bango's analysis shows the increases were directly related to customer experience. The company has drawn up a list of points to consider:

• Speed of processing and connection reliability. There is a direct relationship between uncompleted payments and how long it takes the billing platform to establish the connection and process the billing. Bango says in most cases this should take no more than a few seconds.
• A fast track payment flow, showing only the screens that are needed for compliance with local standards, means more people pay.
• Automatic identification of user and available payment methods. Some service providers still ask for the user to input their phone number, handset type or country. Unnecessary user interaction means unnecessary payment failures. A sophisticated platform will automatically profile all of the user characteristics needed to process a payment, with the user needing to do nothing more than confirm the payment.
• Service uptime and system resilience. Content providers should ensure the billing platform provides independent uptime data from a source such as Pingdom. Bango says it delivered 99.95% uptime over the last year.
• Consumers who cannot pay on their phone bills are offered alternative payment methods. This can lead to an increase of up to 10% more payments on some networks.
• Check for hidden costs, such as fixed transaction fees buried in the small print. Ensure your billing provider will automatically pass through the benefit of improvements in operator payout rates and compliance bonuses.

Bango's approach is simple – a high performance mobile payments platform backed-up by a business model that delivers content providers the benefits of our scale and efficiency.  We achieve this through low costs of billing and one simple, monthly fee, says Malhotra.
Bango says its billing platform provides an easy way for anyone with mobile content or services to sell that to consumers in over 150 countries around the world. Businesses integrate with Bango once and can quickly start earning in their chosen market. It is easy to expand into other countries at any time, without additional integration effort. Customers can pay for content on their phone bill, with their credit or debit card, or via PayPal.