Using Boku To Collect Mobile Payments For Your Game

Ron., from Boku, talks about mobile payments for your game

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/engage-expo-boku-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]mayQZvbTLUw[/wp_youtube]

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at Engage Expo and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Ron: Hi, I’m Ron Hirson from Boku.

Interviewer: What’s Boku about?

Ron: We’re a mobile payments company. We’re setting the standard in mobile payments by delivering this platform that lets people buy virtual goods currencies but pay using their mobile phone. So, the experience would be as I’m checking out instead of using my credit card or filling out an offer form, I can just simply enter my telephone number, receive a text message, and then the bill would appear on my mobile phone bill.

Interviewer: You know, this seems to be popular in Asia. Is it even popular in the U. S? Is it something that you think is going to take off, or why not use a credit card?

Ron: It’s amazingly popular here. Actually, it’s even bigger than we had imagined. So it only launched in the U. S. It’s actually skyrocketed to be our number one country, including the fact that we’re in 50 countries, and they include most of Europe and then first tier world and the second tier. We’ve seen great growth here.

The reason we believe and are seeing it today is that it’s frictionless, it’s simple. I can actually enter in my telephone number instead of the credit card, CV number, address, zip code, and most people know their telephone number. Most people don’t know their credit card.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Ron: The great thing about that is it hits two markets, those who find the convenience of buying a virtual good, this impulse purchase. Using a mobile phone is something that they prefer to do, and then also a segment of the population that don’t have PayPal accounts or credit cards.

Interviewer: Do you see then… Is this really huge then with, I guess, teens and kids because they don’t have access to credit cards as easily?

Ron: We see it as both. We see it as sort of the Gen-Y as well as we see quite a few middle aged moms playing simple casual games and social games, the social apps that you are seeing growing virally.

Interviewer: One of the issues with mobile development or mobile payments is that they take a huge percentage, and so how do you guys deal with it? What do you recommend for developers to be able to fund their development, taking payments from mobile phones?

Ron: One of the key unique features of Boku is we enable in our commerce engine a bit of a pass on the fees because the fees are quite large. This enables the developer to say: for a $2.00 price point I’d like to transparently show the way you would if you were buying an Amazon book and you see a shipping charge, the carrier’s charge of that extra percentage.

That enables a lot of people to purchase but still maintain the margin that they want from the digital goods.

Interviewer: Do you see any suggestions then for developers in terms of ways that they can increase monetization of their projects based on what you’ve seen?

Ron: So, when you directly connect with Boku, we enable you to go live in 50 countries via one API. That API is extendable enough that you can choose a core currency and core price points, and then dynamically translate that into local currencies around the world. Displaying local currency actually has a huge bump in conversion. It’s also the fact that our interface is translated into multiple languages which also, when you are exposing, obviously, the native language to a consumer in Taiwan, for example, which we just launched last week. You see a great lift in conversion.

Interviewer: Do you have API for Flash, or does that even matter?

Ron: Yeah, so we have a custom API that will go on top of what we have. We have an iFrame, API and templates. For example, an implementation, Hazap is a purveyor of Flash games. They email us on a Friday night at 9 o’clock and said, whoever between you and your competitors can go live first in our environment, wins the deal and we were live with them at 11 A.M. that next morning.

Interviewer: Nice. Where do you see mobile payments going in the future?

Ron: So, we’ve already captured a good portion of the market by going to these 50 plus countries. What I see is going to happen over time is carrier fees are coming down and will continue to come down to more reasonable levels, and that will open up the market beyond… It will open up the market for virtual goods because you won’t have to pass on the fees, and the conversion is still great because you’re accessing a different population.

But it will get even better when the fees aren’t as high, and then you can actually start seeing mobile payments moving beyond online digital goods to online licensed digital goods, then to online physical goods.

Interviewer: You know with these SmartPhones coming out, will you even need to go through mobile payments? If there’s a browser already in these SmartPhones, will you be able to bypass it, or how do you see that?

Ron : No, the fantastic thing about mobile payments as we’ve built it is it enables people to pay using the mobile phone bill. Putting in a credit card on a SmartPhone, you can imagine tapping in on your iPhone your credit card number and all that extra information as opposed to just entering your telephone number. Whether it’s on the mobile web or the true web, mobile payments is a way of checking out as much easier.

Interviewer: Where can developers get started then with your project?

Ron: So, you can visit us at www.boku.com. That’s b-o-k-u, and we have a whole host of publisher materials there, an online sign up form and information about how our conversion, our country coverage and our engine works.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.