Brazil’s Open Finance: five years of evolution and ecosystem building

Bruno Diniz, Managing Partner at Spiralem - Innovation Consulting, explores how Brazil’s Open Finance evolved in five years from a regulatory push into one of the world’s most advanced financial ecosystems.

In 2025, Brazil celebrates five years of Open Finance, a journey that has transformed a regulatory initiative into one of the world’s most advanced financial ecosystems. What began in 2020 with the Central Bank’s first regulatory push has matured into a dynamic environment that connects the multiple financial dimensions of individuals and companies while enabling innovation at scale. From the outset, Brazil aimed to build a system that created value for all players while fostering trust, usability, and innovation.

It is no coincidence that much of Brazil’s financial innovation roadmap now intersects with Open Finance, enabling the rise of intelligent, interoperable, holistic, and user-centred products and services. As of today, the numbers speak clearly: over 800 institutions, 70 million users, and billions of monthly API calls, driving faster onboarding and more personalised financial products. This momentum is only the beginning of what Open Finance can unlock.

Governance as a cornerstone

From the very beginning, Brazilian Open Finance was guided by clear objectives: fostering innovation, stimulating competition, optimising efficiency, advancing financial inclusion, and empowering consumers. The system has advanced steadily without losing sight of these goals, thanks to the strong leadership of the Central Bank of Brazil and its ability to engage market stakeholders effectively.

The 2024 creation of the Open Finance Brazil Association gave the system lasting governance, inclusive representation, and professionalised decision-making.

The representational model today encompasses a broad spectrum of regulated institutions, including new entities such as payment initiation service providers. The inclusion of such players – alongside two elected independent board members – ensures that decisions reflect diverse perspectives from market actors and society. This plural governance has been critical in making Open Finance a system co-owned by incumbents, fintechs, and cooperatives alike.

On the customer side, the early years were often described as ‘consent for consent’s sake,’ when users granted permissions without seeing meaningful results. That phase is behind us. The combination of consent-based data sharing and payment initiation now powers solutions like Pix by proximity, BNPL embedded in Pix, Sweeping Account (called “Intelligent Transfers” in the country) and recurring payments via Automatic Pix. These innovations have already moved from pilot stage to mainstream adoption, with leading players leveraging Open Finance to deliver more accurate credit products, smoother onboarding, and hyper-personalised experiences.

 From experiment to global benchmark

The evolution of Open Finance in Brazil is also rooted in robust infrastructure. Tools such as the Data Quality Motor and the Metrics Collection Platform now sustain billions of API calls reliably – more than 102 billion in 2024 alone. This focus on quality and monitoring ensures that performance keeps pace with adoption, reinforcing the trust essential for scale. Still, challenges remain: public awareness is uneven, improvements in data quality are ongoing, and corporate engagement, while promising, is yet to reach its full potential.

A defining feature of Brazil’s model is the strategic symbiosis between Pix and Open Finance. Their roadmaps have been deliberately intertwined, ensuring that progress in instant payments amplifies use cases in data sharing and vice versa. This dual-track approach has made Brazil one of the few countries where payments and data infrastructures evolve in tandem. Features such as journeys without redirection, Pix by biometrics, and Automatic Pix exemplify this synergy, making financial experiences simpler and more contextual.

Globally, Brazil stands out. According to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, regulatory-driven models, such as Brazil’s, evolve 22% faster than purely market-led approaches. Moreover, Brazil chose from the start to broaden its scope beyond banking, incorporating insurance, pensions, investments, and even the possibility of expansion into energy and telecom. This wide reach has positioned the country not just as a regional leader but as a global benchmark for how Open Finance can be structured to maximise inclusion and innovation.

Looking forward, the agenda is ambitious. Credit portability is set to become a reality, allowing users to seamlessly transfer loans across institutions. SMEs are expected to play a larger role, benefiting from batch payments and tailored credit solutions. Enhancements in monitoring, data quality, and API success rates will be necessary to sustain growth. All these developments point to a deeper integration of data and services, reinforcing the idea that Open Finance has evolved into a living infrastructure, not merely a regulatory framework.

As I often say, Open Finance is the enabler of a premium financial experience, delivering programmability, intelligence, personalisation, and contextual relevance. When combined with infrastructures such as Pix, it creates an open, intelligent, and interoperable set of rails. This foundation is particularly critical in a world where artificial intelligence – a relentless consumer of data – is becoming integral to finance.

Brazil’s five-year journey proves that when governance, regulation, and market collaboration align, it is possible to build a system that is inclusive, innovative, and resilient. What started as an ambitious regulatory initiative has become a global reference, offering valuable lessons for Latin America and beyond.

This editorial piece was first published in The Paypers' Open Finance Report 2025, the latest comprehensive market overview and analysis focusing on the key players and products within the Open Banking and Open Finance ecosystem. Download the full report to discover more insightful content.

About the author

About Spiralem

Spiralem Innovation Consulting is a boutique consultancy specialised in financial innovation. The firm advises financial institutions, fintechs, and corporations on strategy, ecosystem orchestration, and the adoption of emerging technologies such as Open Finance, payments modernisation, embedded finance, tokenization, and AI. Spiralem bridges Latin American markets with global innovation hubs.