CompetitorsThin moat
StoneCo (STNE) — moat facet
The published market shares add up to well over a hundred percent, because Brazilian merchants run several acquirers at once — which is the whole explanation for what happened to the take rate.
Independent tracking of the Brazilian acquiring market in January 2026 put Cielo at 28 percent, PagBank at 26, Itau's Rede at 25 and StoneCo at 22, with Santander's Getnet at 5 by volume1. Those figures sum to more than a hundred, and that is not an error. Brazilian merchants routinely accept cards through several acquirers at once, switching the mix terminal by terminal depending on who is offering what this month.
That single fact explains most of what happens to pricing in this industry. When the customer does not have to leave in order to buy from someone else, the cost of taking their business is close to zero, and a rate cut can be answered in a week. The moat's own Competition and Take-Rate Compression threat argues what this does to StoneCo's economics; these pages are about who is on the other side of it, and how differently they are constructed.
Two of the four largest are owned by banks. Rede belongs to Itau and Getnet to Santander, and a bank-owned acquirer can price the terminal at nothing and recover the money on the current account, the payroll mandate and the loan. StoneCo cannot answer that symmetrically, because it does not have a hundred-year deposit franchise to subsidise from — it has to be paid for the thing it sells.
The other two attack from where StoneCo came from. PagBank at 26 percent and Mercado Pago are chasing the same micro-merchant with the same digital model and, in Mercado Pago's case, with a marketplace that supplies the merchant relationship for free.
StoneCo's own filing names a second client category alongside the merchants: Key Accounts, comprising platform services and sub-acquirers2. The fourth page is about the rival that is not competing for merchants at all — it is competing for the deposit.
StoneCo's share of Brazilian acquiring slipped about two points to 22 percent in the year to January 2026 while Itau's Rede gained five to reach 25. The structure is the problem rather than the execution: merchants keep terminals from several acquirers at once, so the published shares sum well above a hundred percent and the cost of taking a rival's customer is close to zero. Two of the four largest competitors are owned by banks that do not need acquiring to be profitable.
Shares that sum above 100% mean merchants use several acquirers; StoneCo's 22% can be lost without anyone switching.
- Third-party estimateJanuary 2026 tracking put Cielo at 28%, PagBank at 26%, Rede at 25% and StoneCo at 22%, with Getnet at 5% by volume — figures that sum above 100% because merchants use several acquirers at once.NeoFeed / UBS BB acquirer tracking, January 2026 — Cielo held first place with 28% market share, up 2 percentage points year on year; PagBank second with 26%, up 2 points; Itau's Rede third with 25%, the largest gain in the market at 5 points; StoneCo lost 2 points to 22%; Santander's Getnet fell to 9% by user count and 5% by transaction volume. Total Brazilian card transaction volume rose 10.1% in 2025 to R$4.5 trillion — January 2026 · publ. 2026 · source ↗
- ReportedStoneCo divides its clients into MSMBs and Key Accounts, the latter comprising platform services and sub-acquirers.StoneCo Ltd. Form 20-F for FY2025 (CIK 1745431) — active payment clients of 4,803.5 thousand at 31 December 2025, against 4,172.7 thousand in 2024 and 3,522.1 thousand in 2023; TPV of R$560.9 billion, against R$516.2 billion and R$438.3 billion; revenue of R$14,153.8 million and adjusted net income from continuing operations of R$2,477.2 million; more than 3.6 million banking active clients, the majority of whom are also payment clients; retail deposits of R$11,091.0 million against R$8,704.8 million and R$6,119.5 million; a credit portfolio of R$2,836 million with expected credit losses of R$389.7 million, against R$1,207.6 million and R$144.5 million a year earlier; clients divided into MSMBs (micro-merchants and SMBs) and Key Accounts, 'comprised of platform services and sub-acquirers'; StoneCo became in 2017 the first non-banking entity authorised by the Central Bank to operate as an Acquirer through a payments-institution licence, and is among the six largest players by total card volume per ABECS; distribution through proprietary and franchised hubs sold on 'service differentiation as the main driver', digital channels, and more than 500 Strategic Partners at December 2025; per the Central Bank, Pix's share of the total number of transactions rose from 1% in Q4 2020 to 52% in H1 2025 and its share of monetary volume from 1% to more than 26%; the filing warns that 'the concentration of our clients by geography and economic sector may increase our risk' and that the company experiences churn from business closures and account transfers; interest rates directly affect both revenue generation and cost of funds, most third-party funding being linked to the Brazilian interbank rate; StoneCo's own analysis notes that US MSMB take rates have been stable over five years despite penetration around 120% of consumption, and finds no indication of saturation-driven price reductions in Brazilian cities with low cash usage — FY2025 · publ. 2026 · source ↗
- StoneCo Form 20-F, FY2025 — Business & Risk Factors (SEC EDGAR)
- NeoFeed / UBS BB — Brazilian acquirer market shares, January 2026