Brazilian Regulators Strained Amid Instant Payment and FinTech Boom

Brazil’s central bank is reportedly facing budget and staffing strain amid a financial system boom.

As Bloomberg News reported Tuesday (May 12), the regulator’s staffing levels have fallen by 42% in the last decade, while the number of regulated financial institutions has surged by 50% during the same period of time.

That crunch is projected to worsen, the report added, with roughly 17% of the 600 workers responsible for financial regulation eligible for retirement. Many are now moving to leave, Bloomberg said, following the collapse of mid-sized Brazilian lender Banco Master last year.

A source familiar with the matter told Bloomberg there are concerns among workers that staff could be held responsible for failures related to that scandal. Brazil’s central bank last year effectively shut down Banco Master—which had struggled with mounting liquidity pressures—while police arrested ​its controlling shareholder.

“Everything needs to grow at the same proportions,” José Luiz Rodrigues, a Brasilia, Brazil-based consultant who specializes in financial regulation, said in an interview with Bloomberg. “The financial system doesn’t function by itself.”

The report noted that the bank has found itself saddled with more duties in the last few years. In 2020, it began operating Pix, Brazil’s exceedingly popular instant payment system, created to modernize the country’s national payments infrastructure.

Bloomberg said the central bank has been devoting increasing attention to Pix, which requires round-the-clock monitoring.

At the time of Pix’s fifth birthday, it had become Brazil’s dominant real-time payments rail, with transactions reaching close to 7.3 billion in October, from 5.7 billion one year earlier.

This shift has been driven by “Brazil’s highly digital consumer base and mobile-first behavior have accelerated the adoption of instant account-to-account payments,” as PYMNTS wrote.

The trend has also moved from retail adoption to everyday B2B use, with Pix’s year-over-year growth in 2025 demonstrating that businesses are moving meaningful payment flows onto real-time rails.

“While Pix was launched to address consumer and person-to-person needs, the consumer-led adoption created the conditions for commercial use,” PYMNTS wrote. “As faster payments became ubiquitous, businesses embraced the same rails to move money with greater speed, certainty and visibility.”

Brazil also remains Latin America’s “clearest beacon for digital payments at scale,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this year, citing research showing that 61% of Brazilian shoppers had used a mobile phone to make retail purchases, the highest rate among surveyed countries.