Bango Payments architecture

The Bango Platform provides an abstraction layer, exposed publicly as the Bango Payment API, between merchants (which offer products and services for sale) and payment providers (which take payment from users). In Bango terms, using the Bango Payment API means you're acting as a merchant.

Because payment providers all work differently, the Bango Platform provides merchants with a consistent interface for selling items: the Bango Payment API. This lets you stop worrying about the API requirements of any particular payment provider. It makes it easy, for example, to add support for payment providers without rewriting your code, and it means your code is insulated from any changes payment providers make to their systems.

Payment routes already supported include all variants of Direct Carrier Billing, operator-provided non-airtime wallets and mobile money Mobile Network Operator independent wallets.

The Bango Payment API is RESTful, uses UTF-8 JSON to encode parameters and response values, and includes features to help you test your store's integration. (Make sure you understand the connectivity requirements for accessing the Bango Platform.)

The Bango Payment API supports simple one-off payments, split sales, full or partial refunds, digital and physical goods, and gives access to historic or active transactions.

To work best with the different systems used by payment providers now and in the future, the Bango Payment API uses a "conversational" approach. For example, when your store uses the API to identify a user, the API may respond with a request to send an SMS from the user's handset, or wait for a few milliseconds, before asking for the user's identity again.

The Bango Platform already supports models such as mobile network identification (typically header enrichment), SMS or two-factor authentication flows, consent screens, open identity standards (OpenID, oAuth), and custom identity standards.

The Bango Platform uses a unique, opaque numeric identifier (known as a Bango ID) to identify each user, and your store uses the Bango ID to charge the user. This allows payments based on a wide range of user credentials, all held securely in the Bango Platform. Working with Bango IDs means you don't need to worry about PCI compliance or Mobile Operator Audits and privacy requirements.