Aposta Ganha’s CTO, Rony Silva, tells us how Pix shifted Brazil’s fraud landscape, the limits of Pix Automático, and what other LatAm markets can realistically replicate
Brazil‘s gaming market opened for licensed business in 2025 with Pix already embedded in daily life. The Central Bank‘s instant payment system, launched in 2020, had achieved near-universal adoption before the first regulated operators went live – a coincidence of timing that shaped the market’s commercial conditions from the start. Deposits were instant, friction was minimal, and uptake followed accordingly.
While this created opportunity for iGaming operators, Rony Silva, CTO at Aposta Ganha, who spoke to Payment Expert ahead of his attendance at SBC Summit Americas, has watched the fraud picture evolve alongside payment infrastructure. His conclusion is that Pix did not reduce fraud exposure – it relocated it. “My perception is that the fraud has shifted primarily to another point in the chain,” he says.
The defences against fraud have moved in tandem. Facial recognition, withdrawals locked to registered bank accounts, and transfers restricted to accounts matching the depositor’s CPF number (taxpayer ID number) have become the primary controls. The attack surface moved from the payment layer to identity and account management, and operators have had to build their defences around that reality rather than the one that preceded it.
What the Central Bank has and hasn’t solved
The Central Bank has updated its toolkit as fraud has proliferated. Silva points to MED 2.0 – the revised Special Return Mechanism for recovering fraudulently transferred funds – and improvements to money trajectory tracking as meaningful steps.
“Recent improvements in mechanisms such as MED 2.0 and money trajectory tracking demonstrate efforts to make the solution more robust,” he says. Whether those improvements keep pace with increasingly sophisticated fraud attempts is up for debate.
Pix Automático is a separate product from the instant payment rail operators already use – a scheduled, recurring variant of the system designed to handle automatic transfers without manual authorisation each time. Operators exploring recurring payment models – subscription tiers, automated VIP structures – have found it a closed door for now. The system was built for utility payments and similar recurring categories. Betting is not among them.
“Originally, the automatic Pix system was designed for recurring payment categories, which betting does not fall under,” Silva says. “This alone makes its use unfeasible at the moment.”
Responsible gambling obligations would complicate matters even if the classification changed. Automating deposit flows sits uneasily alongside requirements for player-initiated transactions and spending controls. The compliance case for deploying it in gaming, even hypothetically, is therefore quite complicated.
The Pix replication question
Across Latin America, Pix has been watched closely by regulators and operators alike. The infrastructure itself is not hard to copy. But what drove adoption in Brazil was a specific combination of Central Bank authority, a mandate covering all financial institutions, and a consumer base with an appetite for new payment technology.
“The combination of timing, user adoption, and the efforts of public and private initiatives made Pix the success it is in Brazil,” Silva says.
However, he does not rule out partial replication elsewhere. “I see that some of these factors can also be replicated in other Latin American markets.” The conditions are not the same across the region, though, and Brazil’s particular history of rapid technology adoption is not something that transfers by policy decision.
The more immediate pressure for Brazilian operators is closer to home. Gaming licensing and Pix regulation are developing on separate tracks, and Silva identifies the risk of implicit or explicit restrictions on iGaming within the payment framework as the point where instant payments and iGaming diverge.
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