Mr. Saulino began his career in mobile commerce business development at Bango between 2006 and 2008.

He then took a position at start-up Billing Revolution, overseeing the initial sales of that company’s mobile credit card play. He returns to Bango after his brief sabbatical with greater experience of how mobile payments businesses succeed or fail. 

Mr. Saulino will be based at Bango’s new headquarters in New York, where he will be responsible for developing strategic sales opportunities for Bango and for overall business development, particularly targeting major media corporations in the Americas.

Mobile Marketer’s Giselle Tsirulnik interviewed Mr. Saulino. Here is what he said. 

What does Bango have planned in terms of targeting mobile payment opportunities in the United States?
Bango will always look to provide the best billing services to organizations that will benefit from the increased conversion rates that our server to server carrier billing platform provides. 

In terms of targeting, applications continue to be the hot topic of the day with in-application billing becoming more relevant and challenging for brands and developers. 

At Bango we have created a solution that addresses this need and therefore application portals will be one of the main sectors we will continue to target in 2010 – 2011.
 
What is your mandate?
Having gained greater experience in the mobile payments market, at Bango I will be working to develop strategic sales opportunities and be responsible for overall business development, with a particular focus on targeting major media corporations in the U.S.
 
What is the current state of mobile payments and where do you see it going in the next year or so?
Mobile payments, specifically in the U.S. have evolved as a business model from the old days of premium phone charges through to the new world of iTunes, PayPal, Amazon and mobile Web billing.

As mobile Web consumption continues to grow rapidly, there are five significant trends in mobile payments that we believe will develop over the coming months:

1. Carriers will open up their billing relationships with their subscribers to third parties

2. SMS as a mechanism for billing will be replaced by web based systems

3. Non-operator (Internet) payment systems will become much more popular through mobile devices

4. Phone hardware will start to be involved in retail and presence based payments

5. The widespread presence of phones with internet access will enable the rapid deployment of web based peer-to-peer payments and social payments – like the original PayPal of 10 years ago

Can you talk about Bango’s presence in Europe?
Europe is where Bango started and we have built a strong presence there.

We have successfully established strong relationships with the main European carriers and our billing and analytics technology is used by major European customers like SkySports, Shazam, GoSpoken, Gameloft among others.

We will continue to be a key player in the European mobile market and support the needs of businesses wanting to target the fast-growing market of internet enabled mobile phone users.

Final take
Giselle Tsirulnik is senior editor of Mobile Commerce Daily