🏦 Banks vs fintechs

The Brazilian government is expected to present Congress with a proposal to change tax rules for fintechs, aligning their tax rates more closely with those of conventional banks. The prospect has mobilized powerful lobbies in Brasília and reignited a broader debate over the country’s dynamic financial innovation scene: what happens when startups evolve into banking giants?

The backdrop to this discussion concerns a provisional decree introduced by the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva administration earlier this year, raising taxes on several investment products. But Brazilian law states that such measures must be approved by Congress within 120 days or they lapse and cannot be reissued, and lawmakers allowed that decree to expire.

This left the government scrambling to…

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