PicPay Revenues Jump 85% as Financial Services Portfolio Expands

PicPay, the Brazilian digital payments firm, is increasingly leaning on artificial intelligence to manage its rapid scale.

The Brazilian digital payment firm discussed this effort Wednesday (March 18) as it reported its first quarterly earnings since going public earlier this year.

Those results showed a 85% increase in net revenues for the year, a jump the company credited to the expansion of its financial services portfolio and increased cross-selling within its base of customers.

CEO Eduardo Chedid told analysts that the company’s AI strategy moved into high gear soon after the public launch of ChatGPT. PicPay migrated all first-level customer service to the AI model roughly two years ago, a shift which had a tangible impact on the company’s payroll and operations.

“Just to give you a sense of how good that was, we ended up avoiding hiring almost 3,000 customer service reps in the past two years,” Chedid said.

The automation efforts extend beyond cost-cutting into revenue generation. Last year, PicPay’s AI engines generated more than 50 billion personalized recommendations for its customers, a move management credits with increasing the penetration of its credit and insurance products.

The company is also integrating its services into daily habits; for example, more than 10 million users now conduct “Pix” transactions, Brazil’s ubiquitous instant payment system, directly through WhatsApp using PicPay’s backend.

“The goal here is actually to have 100% of the PicPay products and services that can be done without the app and actually live where the customer is,” said Danilo Caffaro, PicPay’s executive vice president of consumer banking.

Looking ahead, the company is finalizing tests on its own proprietary foundation model for credit underwriting. This tech-first approach to lending is central to PicPay’s “hub” strategy, where it aggregates a user’s balances and credit card data from other banks to create a more complete financial profile. Management believes this data allows for better underwriting and higher revenue per user.

This digital ecosystem is being expanded to include non-banking services, such as a “travel hub” and a food delivery partnership with Rappi, designed to keep users inside the app.

PYMNTS spoke with Chedid last month following PicPay’s Nasdaq debut. As that report noted, the company’s “credit-led evolution is unfolding against a uniquely mature digital backdrop.”

Brazil has reached around 94% digital adoption, according to PYMNTS Intelligence research, with digital payments now serving as key infrastructure rather than emerging technology.

Chedid also credited Brazil’s central bank for helping drive competition and allowing FinTech platforms to scale, cultivating an environment where wallet-based ecosystems can naturally extend into credit.

“That maturity, he suggested, made the shift to balance-sheet lending not just possible, but necessary,” PYMNTS wrote.