By Leonardo Chaves, GM Latam at OKTO PAYMENTS
Brazil closed 2025 with 25.2 million active bettors in the regulated market and a gross revenue of R$ 37 billion across the sector. At the same time, more than 25,000 illegal sites were blocked throughout the year. The progress is real, but the clandestine market remains active and keeps capturing users.
We discussed this at a panel during BIS SIGMA South America, in São Paulo, last week. Our consensus was straightforward: the same controls designed to protect players can, if poorly calibrated, push them toward the very platforms we are trying to dismantle. When deposits are slow, when withdrawals stall, or when the experience is too bureaucratic, bettors migrate to more flexible platforms with less security — and rarely come back. The illegal market spent years optimizing for convenience, precisely because it never had to worry about compliance. The first full year of regulation built a solid legal foundation. The work now is making the regulated experience good enough that players have no reason to look elsewhere.
Most of the conversation in this sector focuses on Pix acceptance: whether a transaction goes through, how fast it settles, and whether the user experience holds up under volume. Those things matter, but they are the visible tip of a much larger operational challenge. Operators running at scale need real-time visibility over balances across multiple accounts and markets, automated reconciliation that does not fall apart during peak hours, and liquidity managed precisely enough that capital is available when and where it is needed. When those layers work well, users do not notice them. When they do not, the first thing that breaks is the experience, and that is when players start looking elsewhere.
Pix as a data layer, not just a payment method
The Central Bank of Brazil estimates that around 99% of betting transactions in the country go through Pix. That volume, concentrated in the regulated market, generates a transactional trail that can be used to detect suspicious patterns, prevent fraud, and identify risk behaviors. But that only works if the volume stays within the supervised environment.
The same transactional trail has another application that the industry has been slow to act on: responsible gaming. Spending velocity, deposit frequency, the timing between a loss and the next deposit, all these patterns are already present in every transaction that flows through the regulated market. The data is there. What is still missing, in most cases, is the coordination between payment providers and operators to read those signals of problem gambling in real time and act on them before the problem becomes visible. Open Finance makes that coordination more viable by making existing data flow to where it can actually be used.
What moves the needle in the short term
In the immediate term, what makes a difference are operational adjustments: faster KYC processes, smoother integration between operators and processors, and chargeback rules suited to the dynamics of the sector. These may look like incremental changes, but they determine, in practice, whether bettors stay within the regulated environment or move outside it.
Hitting the target of reducing the illegal market by 2027 will require more than enforcement. Blocking sites matters, but bettors who want to circumvent the system will always find a way if the regulated alternative feels like the harder choice. The real test is simpler than it sounds: is the experience inside the regulated market consistently easier than what the illegal market offers? Right now, the honest answer is that it depends on the operator and the payment stack behind it. That gap is where the next phase of regulation needs to focus.
About OKTO PAYMENTS
OKTO PAYMENTS is a next-generation payment service provider built on AI, in-house engineering, and a commitment to customer success. The company was designed to serve businesses operating in the most complex e-commerce sectors, going far beyond simple payment processing.
Its platform solves challenges related to scale, compliance, and performance, always with one central goal: to drive its partners’ growth. From the payment stage to the banking link, from treasury to settlement, OKTO PAYMENTS builds the financial infrastructure that guarantees a competitive advantage for its clients. This translates into faster onboarding, more efficient operations, and resilient real-time performance.
The goal is to enable companies to play the game differently, transforming payments—which were once merely operational routines—into real competitive advantages, creating personalized, frictionless experiences for consumers.
With trusted partnerships around the world, OKTO PAYMENTS is redefining how companies build, scale, and succeed in today’s most challenging digital commerce environment.
