Open Finance isn't an API: it's a redistribution of power

When a customer authorizes bank-data sharing through Open Finance (Brazil's open-banking and data-sharing framework), a platform starts to see what no traditional bank can see about that CNPJ: transaction history for the last twelve months, active credit limits, consolidated debts. That isn't a technical integration. It's a shift in who holds the financial relationship.

What Open Finance really is

Regulation from the Central Bank of Brazil (BACEN) organizes Open Finance into phases with distinct scopes — not evolutionary steps of a single feature. Data sharing (Phases 1 and 2), data on contracted products (Phase 4), and payment initiation and credit proposals (Phase 3) are different kinds of access, each with its own implications for consent, architecture, and liability.

Practical use cases the market still underuses

• Onboarding: personal data validated the moment an account is opened, without lengthy forms.
• Contextualized credit offers: access to card and limit data to structure more precise, lower-risk proposals.
• Redirect-free payment: persistent device-level consent, enabling experiences like Google Wallet.
• Reconciliation via E2E ID: native payment traceability for audit and compliance.

The most common implementation mistake

Treating Phase 3 as an isolated engineering project. A correct implementation takes between three and nine months and involves decisions that aren't technical at all: the scope and purpose of consent, the user's authorization experience, which data actually improves risk models, and renewal and expiration policy.

Without these product decisions made before integration, the architecture will be rebuilt. And in Open Finance, rebuilding architecture carries a regulatory cost, not just a technical one.

Pix as infrastructure, not a payment method

Pix (Brazil's instant payment system) has three underused applications that change product logic: webhooks for real-time confirmation and cash-flow-based credit, DICT for frictionless identity validation, and E2E ID as a reconciliation and audit solution. Anyone who treats Pix as just a payment method leaves these layers untouched.