Brazil's Open Finance system has quietly become one of the most consequential financial infrastructure projects in the world. As of early 2026, it had surpassed 60 million active data-sharing consents — a number that places Brazil ahead of every other country in the absolute scale of its open banking ecosystem, including the United Kingdom, which pioneered the concept in 2018.
Understanding what Open Finance actually is, what it has already changed, and where it is heading matters for anyone who holds a bank account, takes out a loan, or invests in Brazilian financial institutions.
What Open Finance is and how it works
Open Finance is a regulated framework that allows customers to authorize financial institutions to share their data with other institutions or fintechs. The operative word is "authorize": no data moves without explicit customer consent, and that consent can be revoked at any time.
The system is governed by the Brazilian Central Bank (Banco Central do Brasil) and organized in phases. The early phases focused on sharing product and service information (interest rates, fee schedules). Later phases enabled sharing of customer transactional data — account history, credit behavior, payment patterns. The most advanced phase, now underway, enables the initiation of payments and financial services through third-party platforms using a customer's data from their primary bank.
In practical terms: if you have a ten-year account history at Banco do Brasil, you can now authorize a fintech lender to access that history when evaluating your credit application. The fintech can then offer you a loan rate based on your actual demonstrated behavior, rather than relying on the limited data in a standard credit bureau report.
The credit scoring transformation
The most immediate economic impact of Open Finance has been in credit scoring. Brazil's traditional credit system was heavily dependent on negative data: whether you had defaulted, whether you had unpaid bills. Positive credit history — paying your bills on time, maintaining consistent balances — was largely invisible to lenders outside your primary bank.
Open Finance reverses this dynamic. With transactional data flowing (with consent) between institutions, lenders can now see positive payment behavior. This is particularly significant for the millions of Brazilians who are formally banked but have thin credit files — they have bank accounts and make payments, but that behavior has never been visible to institutions beyond their home bank.
Early data from the Banco Central suggests that Open Finance is already enabling credit offers to segments that would previously have been denied or priced out of formal lending entirely.
Pix as infrastructure backbone
Open Finance does not operate in isolation — it sits on top of Pix, Brazil's instant payment system. Pix processes more than 6 billion transactions per month and has over 170 million registered users. This scale matters for Open Finance because payment data — who you pay, how often, in what amounts — is among the most informative inputs for credit and risk assessment.
The integration between Pix data and Open Finance data-sharing creates a feedback loop: the more Brazilians use Pix (which is nearly universal at this point), the richer the dataset available for credit assessment when they choose to share it.
Connection to Drex (the digital real)
The Central Bank's CBDC project, Drex, is being designed with Open Finance integration from the outset. Drex — a tokenized, programmable version of the Brazilian real — will enable smart-contract-based financial operations: automated lending, conditional payments, programmable savings.
Open Finance provides the data layer for these operations. If a smart contract needs to verify that a borrower has a consistent income history before disbursing funds, it will access that verification through Open Finance consent flows. The two systems are not competitors — they are designed to be complementary infrastructure.
Regional influence: Colombia and Chile following Brazil
Brazil's scale has made its Open Finance model a reference point for the region. Colombia launched its Open Finance regulatory framework in 2023, explicitly citing the Brazilian architecture as a starting point. Chile's Comisión para el Mercado Financiero began consultations in 2024 on an Open Finance framework using similar consent-based data portability principles.
This regional diffusion matters because it signals that the infrastructure Brazil built is not just a domestic experiment — it is becoming a Latin American standard. Brazilian fintechs that have built capabilities on top of Open Finance have a structural advantage as neighboring markets open up.
| Country | Open Finance Status (2026) | Consents / Active Users |
|---|---|---|
| Brazil | Fully operational, phase 4 active | 60M+ active consents |
| UK | Operational since 2018 | ~12M users |
| Colombia | Framework launched 2023 | In rollout |
| Chile | Regulatory framework in development | Pre-launch |
| Mexico | CoDi / SPEI-based, partial open banking | Limited |
Risks and what remains unresolved
Open Finance's architecture has genuine strengths, but it is not without risk.
Consent complexity: Most users consenting to data sharing do not fully understand what they are authorizing. Revocation mechanisms exist, but the UI/UX of most banking apps makes the process opaque. There is a meaningful gap between formal consent and informed consent.
Concentration in large banks: The major banks — Itaú, Bradesco, Caixa, Banco do Brasil, Santander Brasil — control the data that smaller fintechs want to access. The large banks have incentives to be slow or restrictive in their API implementations, and enforcement of technical standards has been uneven.
Fraud and data misuse: Sharing financial data across many institutions increases the attack surface for fraud. The Banco Central has security requirements, but as the system scales, the number of potential failure points grows.
Consumer awareness: Despite 60 million consents, surveys suggest that most Brazilian consumers cannot accurately describe what Open Finance is or what data they have shared. Informed participation is a goal the system has not yet achieved at scale.
What this means for investors
For investors looking at Brazilian fintech stocks or the broader financial sector, Open Finance creates a structural dynamic worth tracking. It lowers the barriers to entry for credit-focused fintechs and increases competitive pressure on traditional banks. Banks that adapt by building competitive API ecosystems and using shared data to improve their own products will benefit; those that treat Open Finance as a compliance exercise will see their customer relationships eroded.
The 60 million consent milestone is meaningful, but it is a volume metric. The quality metric — whether those consents are translating into better credit access, lower borrowing costs, and more competitive financial products — is what will determine the system's actual economic impact.
At Royal Binary, we track the intersection of financial infrastructure and market dynamics closely. If you're interested in how fintech trends affect the broader investment landscape, explore our platform.