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MEF’s Dario Betti speaks with Jon Prideaux, CEO at Boku about their recent acquisition of identity specialists Danal, how the payments and identity businesses overlap and how they see the ecosystem developing in the future.

“We’ve always described ourselves as a carrier commerce company – the basic vision that Boku was started on, is that there’s a lot of mobile phones out there, and while it’s convenient to make phone calls between those phones, or send text messages or use them for data, there is also a wealth of capability that sits in the back offices of carriers which if, it could only be exposed to merchants on a global basis, could really help lubricate a lot of the parts of the m-commerce journey. The problem with it is that those back office capabilities are fragmented… and it needs an intermediary like Boku.. to create a simple API, a single pipe through which our customers are able to access those capabilities.”

“What was exciting for us about Danal was that it came with a ready-made package of customers like Western Union and Moneygram, PayPal and Square, organisations that are in payments or in money transfers, there are banking customers, the US Government uses Danal services – so the Boku Identity proposition is already providing services to other payment types, supporting money transfers, supporting on-demand services, supporting governments. It really takes us across a whole range of different transaction types from the get-go. As things stand, those services are predominantly delivered in the US market. If there’s one thing Boku has been able to do, it’s been identifying merchant needs, and rolling them out at scale; we have become the largest direct carrier billing player because we recognise that for this payment method to be relevant… we have to provide them with global services, and have a platform that works at scale.”

Watch the full video below.

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