Cumbuca – Regulatory proxy for Brazil’s open finance
There are two ways to enter Brazil's financial system today: both are bad.
. Brazil's central bank has quietly built some of the most advanced rails in the world.
Pix for instant payments: a serious open finance framework, regulators who actually ship. However, if you are a foreign fintech and want to integrate properly, you are looking at years of licensing. The shortcut is to use a third-party platform and live inside their stack. You get speed, but lose control and end up tied to someone else's roadmap. Cumbuca is trying to be the third way.
The São Paulo-based startup is backed by Y Combinator and Lightspeed. They do not sell another closed payment platform: they act as a regulatory proxy. You build your own infrastructure. Cumbuca sits in the middle under its payment initiation licence and talks directly to the Brazilian central bank on your behalf.
In practice, it appears as follows. You get low-level access to Pix and open finance APIs under Cumbuca's licence.
You keep operational control of flows, data, and risk logic.
You move faster than the licensing queue without pretending regulation does not exist.
The story behind it is very Brazilian. Cumbuca started as a consumer app for shared expenses and finshare groups. To make that work, the founders went through the full central bank process and became one of the first payment initiation providers in the country. After years of dealing with licensing pain and third-party outages, they realised the infra they had built was more valuable than the consumer app on top. So they pivoted into a pure B2B proxy for anyone who wants to stand on their shoulders instead of starting from zero.
If you are building a global wallet, trading app, card programme, or banking product, Brazil is probably already somewhere on your roadmap. The real question is not whether you will need Pix and open finance. It is whether you want to wait years for a licence or ship now and keep control. Cumbuca is betting that "regulatory proxy" becomes the default answer for serious players who want both speed and autonomy.
Every day, we share one curated fintech on the FinBox Solutions page. The project with the most votes becomes Fintech of the week and lands here on my profile.
Would Brazil suddenly jump a few lines up your expansion roadmap?
#FintechOfTheWeek #payments #Brazil #openfinance
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