Executive takes leadership of the group’s brand, communications and sponsorship strategies

Esportes Gaming Brasil (EGB), owner of the Esportes da Sorte, Onabet and Lottu brands, has announced Andréa Curral as its new Marketing Director.

With more than 17 years of experience in branding, media, communications and consumer experience, the executive will now lead the company’s positioning strategies, campaigns and sponsorship initiatives at a time of consolidation and expansion within Brazil’s regulated market.

Andréa will be responsible for the group’s brand-building, media, communications, campaigns and proprietary projects divisions.

Her role also includes the strategic management of the group’s sponsorship portfolio, which includes clubs such as Corinthians, Ceará, Ferroviária and Náutico, as well as major cultural events sponsored by the company.

The appointment reinforces the group’s ongoing institutional and operational strengthening, as it continues to expand investment in technology, user experience and brand development within the gaming and entertainment sector.

Having previously worked at companies including Discovery, Warner Bros. and Privalia, Andréa has built a career managing high-complexity operations and leading integrated projects across branding, performance, consumer experience (UX) and brand reputation.

For Andréa Curral, the challenge lies in strengthening the connections between brand, business and audience experience.

“Taking on the marketing leadership of a group with the relevance and growth trajectory of EGB is an opportunity to build projects with real impact.

Our focus is to develop strategies that expand brand presence, strengthen relationships with audiences and support the company’s growth in a consistent way,” she said.

Andréa holds a degree in Social Communication from FAAP, a postgraduate qualification in Project and Portfolio Management from Universidade Anhembi Morumbi, and an MBA in Digital Business from FIAP.

Throughout her career, she has led multidisciplinary teams and participated in organisational transformation and operational integration processes within the media and technology sectors.

About Esportes Gaming Brasil

Esportes Gaming Brasil is one of the main groups in the betting sector in the country, with 100% national operations and an official license granted by the Ministry of Finance, through SPA/MF.

The authorization covers its two brands: Esportes da Sorte and Onabet, operating throughout Brazil.

A leader in innovation and a defender of market regulation, the group’s pillars are its commitment to responsible gaming and continuous investment in technologies for user control and well-being.

With hundreds of jobs created, its operations go beyond betting: it supports projects in the areas of sports and culture, such as the Corinthians, Ceará, Ferroviária and Náutico clubs, as well as high-profile initiatives such as Galo da Madrugada and the Recife and Olinda Carnival.

Onabet, in turn, expands the group’s digital reach with creative campaigns and partnerships with influencers, strengthening the connection with the public on online platforms.

Esportes da Sorte has renewed its official sponsorship of the Parintins Folklore Festival for the 2026 edition.

The brand reinforces its strategy of promoting Brazilian culture after fostering an exchange between the North and Northeast regions during the Pernambuco Carnival.

Esportes da Sorte announced the renewal of its official sponsorship of the Parintins Folklore Festival for the 2026 edition.

Scheduled to take place from June 26 to 28, the event is part of the brand’s strategy to strengthen Brazilian cultural expressions and support the regional creative economy.

The continuation of the partnership follows a cycle of cultural integration promoted by the company over the past year.

In 2026, the group brought artistic references from the Parintins Festival to Recife Carnival by inviting Amazonian visual artist Iran Martins to design the brand’s parade float at Galo da Madrugada.

The project incorporated movement mechanisms and aesthetic elements inspired by the “bumbás” universe into the visual language of frevo.

Beyond brand exposure, the investment in Parintins is part of a positioning strategy focused on valuing Brazilian cultural identity and strengthening initiatives with strong regional ties.

“Our presence in Parintins goes beyond a branding action. It is a commitment to valuing Brazilian culture and the professionals who drive this creative ecosystem.

By bringing together references from the Parintins Festival and Recife Carnival, we show how different cultural expressions in the country can dialogue and create new connections.

We want to continue expanding this impact and contribute to keeping the bumbá tradition strong,” said Marcela Campos, Vice President of Grupo Esportes Gaming Brasil, owner of Esportes da Sorte.

Economic growth and new Bumbódromo

The Parintins Festival 2026 is expected to generate around R$193.2 million, a projected 5% increase compared to the previous edition. The forecast also includes approximately 30,000 direct and indirect jobs, as well as the arrival of around 126,000 tourists.

The audience will be welcomed in the new Bumbódromo, a structure with capacity for up to 25,000 people per day, which will become part of the festival’s expansion in the coming years.

Esportes da Sorte

Esportes da Sorte is one of Brazil’s leading sports betting platforms, with 100% national operations and a license granted by the Ministry of Finance (SPA/MF) to Esportes Gaming Brasil — the group that also owns the Onabet and Lottu brands.

The company is part of a Great Place to Work certified group and generates around 1,000 direct and indirect jobs. Its pillars include innovation, commitment to responsible gaming, and support for sector regulation.

It maintains strategic partnerships with institutions such as ANJL, IBIA, Sportradar, EBAC, and IAA, strengthening control practices, problem gambling prevention, and user protection.

In addition to sports betting, Esportes da Sorte invests consistently in sports, culture, and social projects. It is a master sponsor of clubs such as Corinthians, Ceará, Ferroviária, and Náutico, as well as supporting major cultural events like Galo da Madrugada, Carnival celebrations in cities such as Recife, Olinda, Salvador, Maceió, Natal, Caicó, Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo, and the Parintins Festival. The brand also expands its digital presence through creative campaigns and influencer partnerships, strengthening its connection with audiences across online platforms.

Esportes Gaming Brasil, the 100% Brazilian company behind Esportes da Sorte, Onabet and Lottu, has had one of its most active periods since launching under Brazil’s regulated betting framework.

Esportes da Sorte now ranks as the second largest operator in the country, with most of its technology built and managed internally from its base in Recife, in Brazil’s Northeast.

The company received Great Place to Work certification, won gold at the 2026 CX ClienteSA Award in the Sports Betting and Online Gaming category — following an independent audit by V2 Consulting.

Also launched two high-profile marketing campaigns: “Torça como um Corinthiano,” built around the brand’s partnership with Corinthians and the resilience of one of Brazil’s most passionate football fanbases, and “Convoque,” a multiplatform World Cup campaign that transforms Esportes da Sorte’s iconic blue hat into a narrative universe featuring creators, musicians and football personalities.

At the centre of the company’s technological infrastructure is Ruy Conolly, CTO of Esportes Gaming Brasil.

In this interview, Conolly speaks about how the company built its own internal intelligence layer for risk, data and governance; why the Northeast has become a genuine strategic hub for iGaming in Brazil; and what it really means to treat compliance as infrastructure rather than bureaucracy.

GA – You structured an internal layer of operational intelligence, data and risk governance. How does this technology differ from market solutions and what was the biggest technical challenge in integrating it into the operation’s critical flows?

Ruy Conolly – I usually say that the main difference lies not just in the use of artificial intelligence, but in the ability to transform operational data into reliable and auditable decisions.

Market solutions are important and serve a relevant role, but they often arrive as external, standardised layers with low adherence to the real context of the operation.

What we sought internally was to build an intelligence layer closer to the transactional journey, operational events, risk signals and Brazilian regulatory requirements.

The biggest technical challenge was not simply processing volume. Volume is solved with infrastructure. The real challenge was creating an architecture where data is consistent, auditable and useful for decision-making.

In a regulated operation, a poorly calibrated signal can create unnecessary friction for the client, while an absent signal can create risk for the company.

Technology needs to balance speed, precision and governance. For me, that is the central point: AI in iGaming cannot be treated as decoration. It needs to be tied to well-structured data, traceability, clear criteria and the capacity for human review.

You frequently highlight the Northeast as a strategic engine. How does the location of your technology team influence agility in implementing regulatory changes compared to operators that depend 100% on foreign platforms?

Location influences less through geography and more through cultural, operational and decision-making proximity to the problem.

The Northeast has a very strong culture of execution. People are close to the business, they understand Brazilian user behaviour, they know the local dynamics of payments, customer service, acquisition, risk and operations.

This creates an important advantage in a regulated market, because regulation is not just a legal rule — it needs to become product flow, data validation, permissions, reporting, alerts, customer service and user experience.

When an operator depends 100% on a foreign platform, it often joins a global queue of priorities. Brazilian regulatory changes compete with demands from other countries, other markets and other roadmaps.

When you have local technical intelligence, you can translate regulatory requirements into execution much faster.

The Northeast, in this sense, is not a peripheral alternative. It is a real centre of operational, technological and strategic capacity for the sector.

You have led educational initiatives on match manipulation for athletes. How does your technology team work alongside global monitoring tools such as Sportradar to detect anomalies?

Sports integrity needs to be treated as an ecosystem. There is no single tool, single database or single reading capable of solving everything on its own.

Global monitoring tools are fundamental because they bring a broad market view, international standards, atypical movements and specialised intelligence.

The role of the internal technology team is to connect those signals with the operational reality of the house: betting data, transactional behaviour, history, exposure, limits, recurrence patterns and local context.

But there is an important point: technology does not replace governance. It organises signals, reduces noise, improves response time and helps prioritise investigation.

Responsible decisions require process, human analysis, records, traceability and interaction with areas such as risk, compliance, legal and integrity. In the workshops, the message for athletes is complementary: match manipulation is not just a betting problem.

It is a problem of education, culture, prevention and collective responsibility. Technology helps detect it, but the sector also needs to act before the problem occurs.

When integrating solutions from partners, what is your main technical criterion for ensuring that user experience does not suffer latency, given Brazil’s internet infrastructure?

The first criterion is understanding that integration cannot be treated as merely a technical connection. Integration is user experience, operational risk and brand reputation.

Before any relevant integration, we evaluate stability, response time, resilience, observability, audit capability and impact on the user journey. It is not enough for a partner to function in a controlled environment.

It needs to work well in the Brazilian reality, with different devices, mobile networks, regions and connectivity standards.

The main point is designing the architecture to prevent an external dependency from degrading the overall experience.

In the end, the user does not want to know whether the latency came from the platform, the provider, the jackpot, the payment method or the authentication.

For them, the experience is one. That is why the CTO needs to view integration as a product, not just an API.

You mentioned that iGaming has become a “stack” of integrations that generates noise. What is the first step for a CTO to unstack those layers and give executives a clear view, without inflated dashboards and redundant metrics?

The first step is separating data from decision. The iGaming market has created a culture of many dashboards, many screens, many reports and little clarity.

That gives a false sense of control. The executive does not need another screen, they need to understand what is happening, which risk deserves attention, which indicator actually moves the business and which metric is simply repeating another with a different name.

To unstack, the CTO needs to map the sources of truth. Who owns the data? Which system records the original event? Which metric is operational, which is financial, which is regulatory and which is purely analytical? Without that, each area creates its own numbers and the company ends up debating reports instead of decisions.

Then comes governance: standardisation of concepts, reconciliation, traceability, reduction of redundancy and the construction of a simple executive layer. Good architecture is not the one that shows everything. It is the one that shows the essential with confidence.

How does federated authentication and real permission segmentation move beyond being a security item and become a tool for business speed?

When authentication and permissions are poorly designed, security becomes bureaucracy. When they are well designed, security becomes speed.

In a regulated operation, each area needs to access what is necessary to perform well, but without undue exposure of sensitive data. If everything depends on manual approvals, exceptions, generic access or overly broad profiles, the company becomes slow and vulnerable at the same time.

Federated authentication and real permission segmentation create a more mature model: access by function, audit trail, segregation of responsibility and reduction of operational risk.

The business gain is direct: less internal friction, less improvisation, less risk of data leaks, more speed to launch products, respond to audits, serve regulators and make decisions.

How is Esportes da Sorte’s technology structured to ensure that growth is sustainable rather than fragile, especially when user scale rises sharply?

Fragile growth is the kind that depends only on campaigns, media or volume. Sustainable growth requires structure.

From a technology standpoint, this involves several pillars: reliable data, resilient integrations, observability, security, access governance, audit capability and processes prepared for scale. In iGaming, growth means nothing if the operation cannot reconcile payments, respond to users, monitor risk, protect data and meet regulatory requirements.

Technology needs to be thought of as critical infrastructure. It does not only appear when there is a problem. It sustains the user experience, financial operations, partner relationships, compliance and brand credibility.

My view is that scale is not measured only by how many users enter. It is measured by how much of the operation remains reliable when that volume grows rapidly. That is where a mature operation separates itself from one that is merely loud.

You said at BiS SiGMA Americas that technology is no longer the differentiator, execution is. What does the technical team in the Northeast deliver today that foreign off-the-shelf solutions cannot match?

Technology has become more accessible. Cloud, AI, APIs, providers, dashboards and tools are available to everyone. The differentiator is no longer having access to technology. It has become knowing how to execute with context.

A technical team close to the problem understands the particularities of the Brazilian user, Pix, local operations, regulation, customer service, fraud, communication and the speed at which the market changes.

hat proximity allows faster course corrections and the building of less generic solutions.

Foreign solutions are important and part of the ecosystem, but they often arrive with a global logic. Brazil requires adaptation.

The Northeast delivers precisely that field-level reading: less distance between problem, decision and execution. In practice, this means turning complexity into operational routine. And that may be one of the most valuable capabilities in the regulated market.

How are you designing the architecture so that the new 2026 rules are natively integrated, turning compliance into protection rather than friction?

Compliance becomes a brake when it is placed at the end of the process. When a company designs its product, data and operations without considering compliance from the start, any regulatory requirement feels like an obstacle.

The architecture needs to be built with compliance embedded. That means traceable data, well-defined permissions, logs, audit trails, reconciliation, identity validation, behaviour monitoring, exposure rules, risk management and consistent reporting.

When compliance is native, it protects the business, the user and the brand. It reduces rework, prevents decisions without evidence, improves the relationship with regulators and builds confidence to grow.

The key mindset shift is understanding that compliance does not compete with growth. In the regulated market, compliance is a condition for growth to be lasting.

How do you see the Northeast’s evolution as the second largest iGaming hub? Is it a matter of operational cost or is a specific execution culture emerging in the region?

Reducing the Northeast to operational cost is to misread what is happening. There is, indeed, an execution culture emerging in the region.

It combines proximity to the consumer market, technical capability, pragmatism, speed of adaptation and a very strong culture of solving real problems.

The Northeast is not just providing labour. It is building leadership, technical teams, operations, product vision and market intelligence.

Brazilian iGaming requires a rare combination: technology, regulation, data, marketing, payments, customer service, risk and responsibility.

That combination is not built simply by importing a platform. It is built with people who understand the territory, the user and the operation. I see the Northeast as a strategic hub because it delivers something the market will increasingly need: execution with context. And in the next cycle of regulated iGaming, context will be just as important as technology.