⚠ Security That Everyone Can Now TakeModerate threat
StoneCo (STNE) — threat to the moat
Brazil made card receivables registrable and pledgeable, which was good for merchants and removed the exclusivity that made the collateral a moat.
Lending against a merchant's future card receivables is a good structure. It is also, since Brazil's receivables-registry reforms, a structure available to everyone.
The regulatory intent was to stop acquirers using their exclusive grip on a merchant's receivables to lock that merchant into borrowing from them. Registration made receivables a portable, verifiable asset that a merchant can pledge to a bank, a fintech or a rival acquirer. That was a genuine gain for small businesses, and it removed a moat.
What is left to StoneCo is not exclusivity but priority and information — it is still the party settling the flow, still the first in line, and still the one who has been watching the merchant's sales for years. Those are advantages. They are competitive advantages rather than structural ones, and they compete against lenders who can now see the same registered collateral.
The overlapping problem is that the collateral itself is shrinking as a share of merchant revenue. Card receivables secure a loan; Pix settlements largely do not — and Pix has gone from 1 percent of Brazilian transactions in late 2020 to 52 percent by the first half of 20251. A merchant doing an increasing proportion of business on the instant rail generates less of the asset the loan is written against, at exactly the time the loan book is growing fastest.
The number that tests it is credit outstanding against receivables under management. If the loan book grows faster than the collateral pool for several quarters running, the security is being stretched, whatever the headline loss rate says.
- ReportedPix rose from 1% of Brazilian transactions in Q4 2020 to 52% in H1 2025 and from 1% to more than 26% of monetary volume — settlements that do not become card receivables.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 ↗