Live Gamer has rebranded itself as Emergent Payments, emphasizing its shift from gaming e-commerce to the broader market for digital payments around the world.
Global e-commerce is expected to reach $1.7 trillion in 2015, driven by growth in emerging markets such as Asia, Latin America, and India, according to market researcher eMarketer. And Emergent Payments is going to focus on those territories.
Palo Alto, Calif.-based Emergent Payments aims to enable digital companies to get to market quickly in fast-growing territories where credit cards aren’t the norm. Emergent Payments handles all of the complex local compliance, value-added tax, and cross-border challenges so that businesses can just focus on what they do. Customers can pay with whichever payment method they prefer.
Andrew Schneider, cofounder and president, said in a statement there’s a significant opportunity for digital companies to grow in emerging markets, much like there was for gaming companies in markets where Live Gamer started out. But it’s a complicated puzzle, given the variety of payment methods and tax requirements, Schneider said. Emerging Payments’ job is to reduce this complexity.
Nicholas Wodkte, head of media solutions and product innovation at Samsung Asia, said his team has worked with Schneider’s for many years now, solving myriad problems for product launches in Southeast Asia.
Joost van Dreunen, chief executive of market researcher SuperData Research, said that most global companies prefer to work with specialized payment service providers so they can focus on their core businesses. Gaming companies adopted this path first, and others should now follow, he said.
Emergent Payment’s flagship product is Pay+, a payment platform that easily enables digital businesses to monetize products and services globally by expanding into the world’s fastest growth markets. Country-specific payment methods can account for as much as 70 percent of transaction volume in global markets, Emergent Payments said. Pay+ works in 180 territories and uses more than 200 payment methods, including credit cards, debit cards, bank transfers, pre-paid cards, online bank transfers, mobile payments, e-wallets, cash-based transactions, and crypto currencies. With Pay+, digital businesses can use a single merchant agreement and one point of integration.
Clients include Samsung, DayBreak Games, and Wargaming.Net. Live Gamer was founded in 2007. It sold its micro-transaction platform in 2014 as it decided to focus on global payments.