Open Finance in Brazil: Opportunities for Payments Platforms

Brazil's Open Finance framework completed its Phase 4 rollout in 2023, making it one of the most comprehensive open banking implementations anywhere in the world. Over 850 financial institutions are now participating, and consent-based data sharing is active across retail banking, credit, insurance, and investments. For payment platforms, the opportunity layer is substantial — and largely underexplored.

What Open Finance Actually Enables (Beyond the Obvious)

The headline narrative around Open Finance focuses on account aggregation and personal finance management. Those are real use cases. But for B2B payments platforms, the more interesting opportunities are in underwriting, compliance enrichment, and payment initiation — not consumer dashboards.

Specifically, what Open Finance makes available that was not possible before:

• Account balance verification: Before initiating a large cross-border payment, you can verify the payer's account balance via Open Finance consent — eliminating payment failures caused by insufficient funds after FX conversion.
• Transaction history for KYC enrichment: Open Finance transaction data can supplement traditional KYC documentation, providing behavioral evidence of source of funds that is harder to fabricate than documentation alone.
• Payment initiation via PIX without redirecting to a bank: Phase 2 of Open Finance introduced payment initiation services (ITP — Iniciador de Transacao de Pagamento). This means you can initiate a PIX payment directly from your platform, with the customer authorizing via consent rather than logging into their bank.

The Cross-Border Payment Intersection

Here is where it gets interesting for BackChannel's clients specifically. Open Finance currently covers domestic financial data and domestic payment initiation. Cross-border payments are executed separately, regulated by BACEN's FX resolution framework rather than the Open Finance governance structure.

But the data layer is not separate. A business's Open Finance transaction history — imports paid, exports received, supplier disbursements — is directly relevant to cross-border risk assessment. Lenders and payment platforms that build consent-based flows to access this data gain a materially better picture of FX exposure and payment behavior than is available through traditional means.

In 2025, approximately 38% of Brazilian SMEs that applied for FX payment accounts were rejected by traditional banks citing insufficient documentation. Open Finance data, in structured consent-based flows, could resolve most of those rejections — because the payment history is there, it is just not being accessed.

"The companies building infrastructure on top of Open Finance data consent today will have a structural underwriting advantage in three years. The data exists. The legal framework to use it exists. Most players are just not using it yet."

— Guillermo Arslanian, CEO, BackChannel

ITP Authorization: What It Takes

To initiate payments via Open Finance (as an ITP), a fintech needs BACEN authorization as an Iniciador de Transacao de Pagamento — a relatively accessible authorization tier with a R$1M minimum capital requirement. The authorization process takes approximately 6-12 months including BACEN review.

For platforms that already have BACEN authorization in another category (e.g., as a payment institution), expanding to include ITP functionality is typically an amendment to existing authorization rather than a full new application. The regulatory pathway is established and well-documented at this point.

Consent Management: The Hidden Infrastructure Problem

The technical complexity of Open Finance is not in the API calls — the Open Finance Brasil specification is well-documented. The complexity is in consent lifecycle management.

Open Finance consents have defined durations, specific data scope authorizations, and revocation rights that users can exercise at any time. A payment platform that relies on Open Finance data for KYC enrichment or payment initiation needs to manage consent state as a first-class data entity — not as a simple boolean flag.

This means: consent creation workflows embedded in user onboarding, consent status as a live API field checked before any data-dependent operation, consent renewal flows when authorizations expire, and revocation handling that immediately removes data access and notifies dependent processes. Getting this right is 80% of the Open Finance implementation work.

What to Build in 2026

The Open Finance opportunity in payments is moving from the "early adopter" phase to the "competitive differentiation" phase. The fintechs that built account aggregation use cases in 2022-2023 have been learning what works. The patterns are clearer now.

For payments platforms specifically, the highest-value applications in 2026 are: consent-based source-of-funds verification for cross-border KYC, ITP-based payment initiation for large-value domestic legs of cross-border transactions, and Open Finance transaction data as an input to FX credit line underwriting for SMEs.

None of these require solving new technical problems. They require integrating existing standards in ways that the market is only beginning to do at scale.