Key Accounts: The Customers Who Are Themselves AcquirersNarrow moat
StoneCo (STNE) — moat facet
StoneCo's second customer category is sub-acquirers and platforms — wholesale volume on which none of the hub, the relationship or the credit underwriting can be deployed, because there is no merchant to deploy them on.
The part of StoneCo's customer base that almost never gets discussed is the one its own filing names second. Alongside the micro-merchants and small businesses sits a category called Key Accounts, which the company defines as platform services and sub-acquirers1.
A sub-acquirer is a company that signs up merchants itself and processes their volume through somebody else's licence and infrastructure. Selling to one is not retail acquiring at all: it is wholesale. The volume arrives in large blocks, the take rate is a fraction of what a shopkeeper pays, and — the part that matters — the sub-acquirer owns the merchant relationship. StoneCo processes the transaction and never meets the business behind it.
This is the same direct-versus-indirect structure that shows up at Nvidia and at Marvell, where a distributor appears in the concentration table and the famous end customers do not. It has the same consequence. Volume routed through a platform is volume StoneCo can lose in one conversation rather than in ten thousand, and it is volume on which none of the company's actual advantages — the hub, the relationship manager, the banking cross-sell, the credit underwriting — can be deployed, because there is no merchant to deploy them on.
What it buys is scale in the settlement business and better fixed-cost absorption, which is not nothing.
The number that matters is the split of TPV between MSMB and Key Account volume. The first carries the take rate and the moat; the second carries the volume. A rising Key Account share flatters TPV growth and dilutes everything the moat pages claim.
Wholesale volume through platforms and sub-acquirers carries a fraction of the take rate and none of the relationship — the sub-acquirer owns the merchant, so the hub, the banking cross-sell and the credit underwriting have nothing to attach to. Volume routed this way flatters TPV growth and dilutes the moat, and StoneCo does not disclose the split.
Sub-acquirers bring volume in blocks at a fraction of the take rate, and StoneCo does not disclose the split between merchant and Key Account volume. This ratio is the nearest visible measure: a falling figure is what a rising Key Account share, or Pix, would look like.
- ReportedThe filing defines Key Accounts as 'platform services and sub-acquirers', alongside MSMBs.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 ↗