By Brazil Stock Guide – BTG Pactual (BPAC11), Latin America’s largest investment bank, is taking a bold step into Brazil’s fast-growing payments market with the launch of BTG Pay, a proprietary acquiring platform combining payment links, transaction reconciliation, and its own card terminal. The rollout, starting this Monday (Oct 27), marks BTG’s formal debut in the R$ 3 trillion (US$ 550 billion) acquiring segment — an arena long dominated by fintechs and bank-owned acquirers.
The system, developed from the acquisition of fintech Justa, will connect physical and digital sales channels for small and medium-sized businesses. The platform enters in “soft-launch” mode — initially offering payment links before extending to POS terminals — and features proprietary technology for payment capture, fraud prevention, and automated financial management. The product integrates directly with the BTG Empresas app, which already serves about 500 thousand corporate clients across Brazil.
“BTG Pay reflects our commitment to deliver integrated digital solutions with the bank’s technology DNA. It simplifies business owners’ routines while offering real-time control and security,” said Gabriel Motomura, co-head of BTG Empresas.
The move thrusts BTG into one of Brazil’s fiercest fintech battlegrounds. Cielo S.A. still holds roughly 20% of the acquiring market, with more than 1 million active merchants. StoneCo Ltd. serves over 4 million clients, expanding from payments into credit and digital accounts. PagBank (PagSeguro Digital Ltd.), one of the first Brazilian fintechs to list on the NYSE, reports more than 30 million active users and continues to strengthen its SME base with integrated POS and banking services. Mercado Pago, the fintech arm of Mercado Libre, now has about 15 million active accounts in Brazil, while digital banks like Nubank (nearly 100 million users) and Inter (33 million) are also pressing deeper into merchant payments.
Competition in the acquiring segment has intensified as Pix, the central bank’s instant-payment system, reshapes how Brazilians pay and get paid — reaching more than 175 million users. In this environment, acquirers and banks are racing to become full-service ecosystems rather than stand-alone terminals. For BTG, the entry into acquiring fits its strategy of broadening SME relationships beyond lending, cross-selling cash management, and capturing transactional flows.
BTG’s challenge will be to translate its institutional brand and technology infrastructure into scale, merchant retention, and day-to-day usability. The new product’s success will depend not only on adoption among its existing SME clients but also on its ability to compete in pricing, reliability, and service against fintechs built for volume and speed.
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