Brazil is ready to catch the leadership in the Open Banking sector.
Open Banking Excellence (OBE), during its Open Banking Excellence Campfire, highlighted the initiation of payments in Brazil and touched on the country’s open banking ecosystem, bringing together key players in the financial industry around its digital fire to mark the start of payments in Brazil and discuss the future. Among the guests were representatives of Mastercard, the Central Bank of Brazil, Itaú Unibanco and others.
The Sector is Booming
Over the past 12 months, Brazil has been moving at an astonishing pace, creating a world-class Open Banking ecosystem and now Open Finance. So far in 2022, the National Monetary Council of Brazil together with the Central Bank of Brazil, issued a decree that officially launched the Open Finance project in the country and Pago Market became the first initiator of payments in Brazil. Plus we should not forget that Brazil is the major economy in South America which makes the country a strategic player in the global market.
Challenges and Opportunities
OBE founder Helen Child spoke to Thomas Camargo, Vice President of Open Finance at Mastercard Brazil, about challenges and lessons learned from this ecosystem implementation in Brazil. Camargo said that “the possibilities that Open Finance brings to the market are accompanied by several opportunities for institutions. Therefore, we have been working to demonstrate our experience in the matter in regions such as Europe, Asia and the USA, which makes us an important partner at this time, also to Brazil.”
A position supported by Ana Paula Nunes Cerchiari Almeida, Superintendent of Digital Cash Management & Open Banking at Itaú Unibanco. “We believe that payment initiation brings a great opportunity from the customer’s point of view. I believe that after this initial stage of stabilization of Open Finance platforms, Brazil will see a significant increase in initiators bringing different solutions and benefits to meet the needs of our payers and recipients”.
Janaína Pimenta Attie, Head of Division in the Financial System Regulation Department, Central Bank of Brazil (BCB) has shown how the Open Banking implementation process in Brazil, despite being very recent, has already presented very concrete and expressive results.
Brazilian Institutions Are Transforming the Customer Journey
These achievements were possible thanks to the full support of authorities. Luigi Iervolino, Director & Head of Open Finance CoE at BIP Brasil, said: “Institutions are preparing to literally transform the customer journey by including these new possibilities that payment initiation allows, simplifying onboarding and payment transfer”, while Gavin Littlejohn, Chairman of FDATA, said: “In Brazil, it is critical that customer experience guidelines are implemented and that the regulatory authorities pursue a standardization approach. It is possible to innovate beyond that, but having a high-quality minimum threshold is a great place to start.”
Speaking at the event Huw Davies, Co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer of Ozone API, shared some learnings for Brazil taken from his time leading the development of the Open Banking ecosystem in the UK. Ralph Bragg, Founder & CTO of Raidiam, as also focused its attention on the topic of innovation and the how “Brazil has capitalized on the learnings from the UK and other markets to deliver quickly, plug quite a few of the gaps and fix quite a few of the mistakes we made the first time around.”
