November 28, 2025
Banking as a Service, or simply BaaS, is a term that may sound like a buzzword, but in reality represents a significant transformation in the financial system.
Instead of each company needing to become "somewhat of a bank" to offer accounts, cards, payments, or credit, it is now possible to connect to the infrastructure of a regulated provider and offer these services directly within your own experience, with your brand, your app, and your customer journey.
In Brazil, this model has gained prominence with the growth of digital accounts, the arrival of Pix, the advancement of Open Finance, and an increasingly innovative stance from the Central Bank. As a result, retailers, technology companies, marketplaces, industries, and even service brands are naturally incorporating financial services into their products, increasing engagement, revenue, and loyalty.
What is Banking as a Service (BaaS)?
Banking as a Service is the model in which a regulated institution (bank, payment institution, or specialized platform) provides its financial infrastructure through APIs so that other companies can offer financial services under their own brand.
In practice, this means that:
The front-end company handles the customer experience: app, customer service, value proposition, purchasing journey.
The BaaS provider takes care of the regulated back-end: payment account, connections to the financial system, settlement, compliance, anti-money laundering measures, security, audit trails.
This model allows non-financial companies to offer, for example:
digital account
prepaid, debit, or credit card
transfers (Pix, TED, etc.)
payment of bills and invoices
cashback solutions, benefits, and incentives
embedded credit (BNPL, limits, advances)
All of this without needing to apply for a banking license or build a financial operation from scratch.
Market context and trends in Brazil
Brazil is a particularly fertile ground for BaaS. Several factors help explain this.
Growth of digital accounts
Millions of Brazilians have started using digital accounts as their main relationship with money, whether in digital banks, payment wallets, or retail apps. This opened the door for other brands to also offer financial experiences.
Pix as a powerful public infrastructure
With Pix, the Central Bank created a "common language" for instant payments, available 24 hours a day, with low cost and high adoption. Integrating Pix through a BaaS provider has become practically a minimum requirement for any modern financial solution.
Open Finance and shareable data
Open Finance allows customers to authorize the sharing of their financial data among institutions. This facilitates more personalized offers, such as better-priced credit, tailored products, and intelligent recommendations, integrated into the BaaS offering.
New regulation and focus on competition
The Central Bank has been encouraging the entry of new players: payment institutions, Direct Credit Societies, Peer-to-Peer Lending Societies, regulatory sandboxes. This more open environment stimulates the emergence of platforms that use their own license to serve various companies through the BaaS model.
In the end, financial services cease to be an isolated product and begin to appear within other contexts: transport apps, marketplaces, online stores, corporate benefit apps, and many others.
How the BaaS model works
The BaaS usually follows a B2B2C logic (or B2B2B, depending on the case).
BaaS Provider
It is the regulated institution that offers the infrastructure: account, payment methods, cards, currency exchange, credit, compliance trails, APIs, dashboards, and reports. Typically, it is a licensed bank, a payment institution, or a fintech with a specific license from the Central Bank.
Contracting Company
It is the company that wants to offer financial services to its customers, employees, suppliers, or partners. It can be a retailer, an industry, a SaaS platform, an exchange, a marketplace, a benefits company, or a B2B platform.
End Customer
This is the person or entity that actually uses the financial product, whether an individual or a corporation.
Model Flow
In a simplified manner, the flow works like this:
The contracting company defines what type of financial solution it wants to offer (account, card, payments, credit, incentives, etc.).
It connects to the BaaS provider's APIs, which expose functionalities such as creating an account, issuing a card, initiating a Pix transaction, checking balance, generating statements, validating KYC/KYB, and others.
The experience happens on the contracting company's interface: app, website, or even channels like WhatsApp and integrations with internal systems.
Behind the scenes, the BaaS provider registers the account, validates the holder, processes payments, complies with the Central Bank's requirements, reports information, controls limits, and monitors risks.
The secret of the model lies in abstraction. The company does not need to understand everything about regulation, banking infrastructure, risk, and security. It relies on the partner's infrastructure and focuses on product, relationships, and distribution.
Benefits and advantages of BaaS
For businesses
Faster market entry
Instead of spending years structuring licenses, regulatory teams, core banking technology, and complex integrations, the company leverages a ready and validated infrastructure, significantly reducing time to market.Cost and CAPEX reduction
There is no need to invest heavily in proprietary platforms, data centers, payment specialists, and entire areas of risk and compliance. There are costs, of course, but it is much more efficient than building everything from scratch.Focus on the core business
The company remains focused on knowing the customer, designing the journey, creating a fitting product, and making distribution. The banking part is left to those who have the regulatory duty to specialize in it.Product customization
The company can design financial offers that resonate with its audience much more accurately: cashback rules, benefits tied to consumption, limits matched to behavior, bundles with non-financial services, and so on.New revenue source
Financial services generate new lines of revenue: card interchange, spreads, premium account fees, commissions on credit or insurance, service fees, and other models.
For end customers
Simpler and integrated experiences
Instead of using one app to buy and another to pay, the customer does everything in the same environment.More relevant products
As the company knows its audience well, it can offer something that makes sense in that journey, such as a line of credit tied to a retailer's sales flow or a digital account focused on platform drivers.Expanded access
In many cases, BaaS helps include people or companies that were often overlooked by traditional banking models.
Main solutions and use cases of BaaS
The menu of possible solutions with BaaS is large. Some common examples in Brazil:
White label digital account
A company offers a digital account with its brand, but operated by the BaaS provider's infrastructure. It can be for individuals, businesses, or segmented (accounts for drivers, retailers, delivery people, influencers, etc.).
Physical and virtual cards
Issuance of prepaid, debit, or credit cards linked to the digital account. They can be used for consumption, corporate benefits, advances, travel expenses, sales incentives, and more.
Payments and transfers
Integrations of Pix, payment slips, bill payments, recurring charges, QR Codes, payment links. All of this embedded within the company's digital journey.
Incentive and benefits solutions
Cards or digital wallets used to reward teams, partners, franchisees, or clients, with specific usage rules.
Embedded lending
Credit offers arise in the right context: anticipation of receivables for retailers, additional limits for loyal customers, financing purchases within the app itself, BNPL (buy now and pay later) within e-commerce.
B2B products
Business accounts with cash flow management, multiple users, corporate cards, approver permissions, reconciliation, and integrations with ERPs.
Specialized operations
In some cases, BaaS also connects with more complex solutions, such as currency exchange, on and off ramp crypto, treasury management, and specific payment arrangements for certain sectors.
Ecosystem: types of providers and market differentials
In Brazil, the BaaS ecosystem is composed of several types of players.
Banks and payment institutions with BaaS platform
These are already regulated institutions that opened their structures via APIs to serve other companies. Some emerged as digital banks, others as payment institutions focused on accounts and payment arrangements.
Fintechs and specialized platforms
Companies born with the proposal to be infrastructure for third parties, acting as the "bank behind" retail brands, platforms, and startups.
Payment hubs and orchestrators
Some providers come from the payments world (cards, acquiring, sub-acquiring) and evolve to offer a more complete set of financial services, approaching BaaS.
Key differentiators when comparing providers
Among the most important points to evaluate are:
regulatory robustness and history with the Central Bank
quality and stability of the APIs
technical documentation, SDKs, examples, and support for developers
security model, encryption, and auditing
flexibility of products (scope of what can be offered)
ability to customize the journey and branding
support SLA, incident governance, and transparency
ability to scale in transaction volume, accounts, users, and, in some cases, multiple currencies or markets
In the end, choosing a BaaS provider is not just about price. It is about choosing the foundation of the financial product that will carry the company's brand.
Connection with Open Finance and other innovations
BaaS and Open Finance mutually reinforce each other in Brazil.
While BaaS provides the "body" (infrastructure for executing transactions, opening accounts, issuing cards, processing payments), Open Finance provides the "context brain" (data and history, shared with consent, that allow for smarter decisions).
In practice, this opens up some possibilities.
Product Personalization
A company that offers accounts via BaaS can use Open Finance data to better understand credit risk, income, financial behavior and, with that, adjust limits, rates, and offers.
Portability and Competition
The customer can migrate their financial history and relationships to the solution created by the company using BaaS, without losing the memory of their financial life.
More Integrated Experiences
With Pix, Open Finance, BaaS, and other infrastructures, the boundary between "bank", "wallet", "shopping app", and "services platform" becomes less and less visible.
Trends on the Radar
embedded finance in practically any relevant digital journey
B2B platforms using BaaS to become the "bank" of their customer ecosystem
international expansion with multi-currency models and integrations with other regulators
use of artificial intelligence for compliance automation, fraud detection, recommendations, and support
Challenges and points of attention
Not everything is simple in the BaaS world. There are some important challenges.
Technological adaptation
The company needs to have a minimum level of technological maturity to integrate APIs, keep its app stable, take care of security, and protect data. It's not just plug and forget.
Governance and responsibilities
Even when using a provider, the company continues to have responsibility for how it offers the financial product, how it communicates with customers, how it resolves issues, and how it handles data. The partnership needs to have well-defined contracts and SLAs.
Regulatory complexity
The regulator looks at the arrangement as a whole. Having a regulated partner helps a lot, but it does not eliminate the need for the company to understand the basics about legal requirements, anti-money laundering policies, LGPD, and advertising rules.
Balance between cost and revenue
It is common to underestimate the effort to activate and engage the user. Financial services only generate revenue if they are used. Costs of issuance, maintenance, support, and operation need to be offset with a clear monetization plan.
Choosing the wrong partner
A provider with unstable APIs, low transparency, little regulatory clarity, or weak support can compromise the end customer experience and even create a risk to the brand's image.
Conclusion
Banking as a Service is redesigning the map of the financial system in Brazil.
Instead of a few large banks owning the entire user experience, a network is starting to emerge where brands from all sectors can offer financial services connected to the real lives of people and businesses.
To outsiders, it may seem like just another jargon. To those inside, it is clear that BaaS is a concrete way to democratize access to financial services, create space for more competition, and allow products to be developed with a genuine focus on the user, rather than merely on the logic of the traditional banking system.
Companies looking to enter this game need three things:
a clear strategy for why they want to offer financial services
minimum understanding of regulatory and operational requirements
careful selection of a solid, transparent BaaS partner aligned with their goals
When these elements align, banking stops being "a bank thing" and becomes a natural part of the value proposition of any business.
FAQ about Banking as a Service
What is Banking as a Service in a few words?
It is the model in which a company connects to the infrastructure of a regulated institution to offer financial services (account, card, payments, credit) under its own brand, using APIs.
Is BaaS the same as Open Finance?
No. BaaS is infrastructure to execute financial services. Open Finance is the set of rules and technologies that allow sharing financial data between institutions, with customer consent. The two complement each other.
Can only banks offer BaaS?
No. Banks, payment institutions, and fintechs with specific licenses can structure BaaS platforms, as long as they comply with the regulations of the Central Bank and other regulators.
Does my company need a license from the Central Bank to use BaaS?
In most cases, no. The license is for the BaaS provider. The contracting company needs to follow compliance rules and the contract with the provider, but does not necessarily need its own authorization, depending on the model. In more complex arrangements, there may be hybrid structures.
How long does it take to launch a product with BaaS?
It varies significantly depending on the scope and maturity of the company. A simple MVP can be launched in a few months, while complex solutions, with multiple financial products and legacy integrations, may require a longer project cycle.
Is BaaS only for large companies?
No. Small and medium-sized enterprises can also benefit, especially those that have a significant customer base or an engaged community and can distribute a financial product with purpose.
This is the general overview. From here, the next step is to turn the concept into a real product within your customer’s journey. It is at this point that BaaS stops being theory and becomes a competitive advantage.
