Bango launches with STC in Saudi Arabia

Saudis love their smartphones – a recent report placed Saudi Arabia as the third most smartphone penetrated nation on earth, behind only South Korea and the UAE. This partnership will allow Saudi BlackBerry users to easily purchase digital content without the use of premium SMS messages or the limitations of credit cards. Instead, users enjoy one-click payment, charging the cost to their phone bill, without the need to register personal details.

Bango has placed a strong focus on Asian markets over the past 12 months. Bango has held a series of events for local operators in its Nexus Masterclass series recently, and has been evangelizing Direct Operator Billing for the region, as well as building relationships and learning from local operators.

Commenting on the announcement, Bango CEO Ray Anderson said: “Bango is experiencing huge interest from operators in the Middle East, where smartphone sales are booming, and they see the huge opportunity from digital content sales”.

This latest BlackBerry World connection takes Bango’s total number of BlackBerry connections to 76. BlackBerry leads the market in operator billing deployments, with more connections than any other app store. Most of the world’s largest app stores are currently rolling out operator billing following BlackBerry and Bango’s lead. In 2013 Bango announced that its total reach exceeded one billion mobile subscribers.

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