E-Prepag: Leading the Games Payment Solutions Market in Brazil

Interview with Fabio Nascimento, Director of E-Prepag

Could you give us an overview of the company?

E-Prepag was founded in 2006 to meet the needs of the games market. We offered cell phone pre-paid recharge services through Rede Prepag, our previous company. Some game companies were having problems with credit card fraud and needed alternative payment methods that would avoid fraud and made possible for young people that do not yet have any bankcard to access the service. So the same model used in this company with cell phone pre-paid recharge services paid through a POS terminal, could be used to sell game credits.

Our commercial idea for the games market was pioneer in Brazil. We saw that the gaming sector was very promising and we created E-Prepag exclusively to sell games and to increase the online games sector.

Having the POS terminal payments as a base, we started to expand creating a distribution system that would enable sales points to resell via internet. We aggregated several cyber cafes and LAN houses in Brazil, which are still an internet access that is widely used and good sales points of the game products.

The most recent product in this sector is the gift card, which is a very well-known product in Europe and the USA and is starting to be commercialized here. We are offering our clients different ways to acquire the credit for online games.

The numbers of piracy in Brazil were always very high, mainly for console and computer games: to play without paying is a very good thing in Brazil!

We have been able to grow alongside the online games. E-Prepag is present in circa 50,000 sales points with POS terminals and cyber cafes. We are also beginning to enter the cell phone area where this type of pre-payment will be more and more important within the segment.

The company is small – we have 12 to 13 people working in the office – but we have a high taxation volume. We are present in all States and we are expanding into other countries in South America (because the game developer does not only “see” Brazil, he sees the entire South America). Expansion is E-Prepag’s next step.

Until today E-Prepag was able to develop and grow without any foreign investment but, since our next step is bigger (outside Brazil), we are opened to talk to other companies within the segment that might be interested in investing.

What type of partnerships are you looking for?

We are looking for companies or investors that aggregate value to what we have created as a company: game companies that are interested in expanding into Brazil and South America in general or investors that are connected to the payments sector or to the games sector.

We see that there is the opportunity to grow, but we need to grow in a more aggressive way and this an important moment to be searching for investors. With investment, we would be able to develop and expand more rapidly.

You have many partnerships with international company. Could you mention some of the big names with whom you have partnerships?

We work with companies from almost every continent, because ours is a universal market. We work with companies from Finland that have great game developers, we work with companies from South Corea, where PC games is a very strong market, we also work with North American companies like, for example Electronic Arts (EA). Habbo Hotel was a big success in Brazil within social games, Stardoll was also very successful among young girls, FPS games are also big in Brazil, etc. We have a dozen partners, but we can have a lot more, because there are many developers all over the world.

I would like you to talk a little bit about the competition and your strategies to differentiate from those competitors.

Competition is there. Some companies have been developing since 2006. We have direct competitors and big companies coming into Brazil. We have been able to maintain our growth due to, for example, our knowledge of what are the sectors we must invest in, because we know the market.

What is your vision for your company in two years’ time?

I would like to expand in South America. We want to maintain our strong presence in Brazil and to take our experience into other countries in South America.

One of our future perspectives is to be within the cell phone apps market. Continue reading…

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