Brazil Open Finance 2026: Why 97% of Businesses Are Still Outside the World's Most Advanced Financial System
Brazil has the world's most advanced open finance system and a 97% business adoption gap. Here is what that tells you about how financial infrastructure gets built.
Brazil runs the world's most ambitious open finance system, a national framework that requires financial institutions to open their infrastructure to new competitors, with customers' consent. It connects over 100 million people and handled more than 5 billion communications between financial institutions each week in 2025. Three percent of Brazilian businesses are connected to it.
Juspay and Cumbuca released the Open Finance Playground, supported by INIT, the Payment Transaction Initiators Association. The project converts hundreds of pages of regulatory documentation into practical, step-by-step guides for companies trying to connect their products to Brazil's open finance network. A working simulation runs alongside each guide, showing in real time what happens at the technical layer as each step completes. The project is open source, open to contributions from any developer, financial institution, or business building on Brazil's system.
The gap the rules created
Brazil's open finance documentation was written to satisfy regulators. That is the standard for financial compliance documents everywhere: legally complete, technically precise, and designed to prove the system works rather than to explain how to use it. The UK comparison makes the cost visible: around 20% of British businesses are connected to their open banking framework, where community guides and implementation resources have accumulated over time. In Brazil, with a system larger by almost every measure, the figure is 3%.
The design pattern runs deeper than any single market. Open finance frameworks across the EU and the US were built to the same standard. The companies that successfully connect are, almost by definition, the ones that can afford to bridge the gap between a compliance document and a working implementation. Smaller fintechs, regional operators, and new entrants face the same specification and stop.
How Juspay entered Brazil in 12 months instead of 30
The practical case was already on record. Juspay entered the Brazilian market 12 to 18 months ahead of what independent entry would have required, by operating under Cumbuca's existing regulatory licence rather than applying for its own. The company now processes payments for merchants including Latam Airlines and Food2Save alongside Visa and Mastercard, with support for fingerprint and facial recognition payments and automated recurring transfers.
The speed advantage came from having the regulatory complexity handled at the infrastructure layer. The Playground extends that logic into open source: not a commercial product, but a shared resource that any developer or company can use and contribute to.
The access gap inside a growing system
Open banking platforms globally are on track to process more than 720 billion requests per year by 2029, and the infrastructure behind that number is expanding. The participation gap, the distance between what a system can theoretically reach and the businesses that can actually connect to it, tends to expand with it.
Brazil's 3% figure is the clearest available evidence of this pattern. The same mechanism that drives digital dollarization in markets where official financial rails carry too much friction plays out at the business layer in open finance. Businesses adapt when formal infrastructure excludes them. Crypto replacing banks in emerging markets documents the same reflex one step closer to the individual.
Who closes the gap
The Open Finance Playground was built by practitioners who spent years inside the implementation and released openly on the logic that an infrastructure's value grows with the number of people who can build on it. The guide is available at juspay.io/open-finance.
A public financial framework that produces a 97% exclusion rate among the businesses it was designed to reach cannot close that gap through documentation alone. Brazil just showed that fixing access to financial infrastructure is a job for the people inside it.
Editor's note
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