Open Finance regulation is done. Business adoption is at 5%. What’s going on? by Dmytro Rukin

Brazil’s Open Finance system has over 800 participating institutions, 70 million individual users, and processed more than 102 billion API calls in 2024 alone. The regulatory framework is five years old and covers data sharing, payment initiation, insurance, investments, and foreign exchange. By any infrastructure metric, it is the most advanced open finance ecosystem in the developing world.

And yet, according to research by Innovations for Poverty Action based on Central Bank of Brazil data, fewer than 3.2% of Brazilian firms had adopted Open Finance as of July 2025. In a survey of over 1,100 small business owners, only 10% even knew what Open Finance was. Fewer than 8% had enrolled. Across the broader LATAM region, the picture is similar or worse. The number you hear in industry conversations is around 5%, and that’s generous.

So the regulation is done. The infrastructure is built. The APIs work. Why aren’t businesses using it?

I run LaFinteca across several Latin American countries, and I’ve watched this gap widen from both sides. On the regulatory side, things moved fast. On the business side, almost nothing happened. And the reasons are not what most industry analysis suggests.

The standard explanation is that businesses don’t know about Open Finance. That’s partly true, but it’s also the easy answer. The deeper problem is that even when businesses learn about it, they don’t see a reason to act. The IPA study found something revealing: the firms most likely to adopt Open Finance were already digitally sophisticated, already using Pix heavily, and already managing inventory through apps. In other words, the businesses that adopt are the ones that least need convincing. The rest, which is the vast majority, look at Open Finance and see no immediate payoff.

This is a product problem, not a regulation problem. Open Finance in Brazil was built from the top down. The Central Bank designed the framework, mandated participation for financial institutions, and defined the technical standards. That worked for getting banks and fintechs connected. But nobody did the equivalent work on the demand side. There’s no clear, simple product that a small business owner in Vitória or Recife can point to and say “this is why I should share my financial data.” The use cases that exist today, better credit scoring, account aggregation, and personalized financial products, are real but abstract. They require the business owner to trust that sharing data will eventually lead to better terms on a loan they haven’t applied for yet or a financial product they don’t know exists.

Trust is the other half of the equation. The IPA research found that Open Finance adopters reported both higher trust in the banking system and a stronger sense of control over their data. That’s a self-selecting group. For the majority of small businesses in Brazil, the relationship with the banking system is transactional at best and adversarial at worst. Asking them to share detailed financial data with the same system that charges them fees and denies them credit is a tough sell, regardless of what the regulation guarantees about data ownership and consent.

There’s also a structural issue that nobody wants to talk about. Most small businesses in Brazil run their Pix transactions through personal accounts, not business accounts. The IPA survey found this is the norm. That means their business financial data is mixed with personal spending, which limits what Open Finance can actually do with it. The system was designed assuming clean business data flows. The reality is messier, and the gap between assumption and reality directly affects the quality of any credit scoring or financial management product built on top of Open Finance APIs.

Across the rest of LATAM, the situation adds another layer of difficulty. Colombia launched its Interoperable Open Finance Hub and is moving toward a mandatory model proposed by the URF in 2025, but the ecosystem is still nascent. Chile has the clearest regulatory roadmap, with full implementation targeted for 2027, but adoption metrics are not yet meaningful. Mexico, despite pioneering the Fintech Law in 2018, has seen what Sensedia’s regional report calls “evolutionary stagnation” in secondary regulation. Argentina and Peru are still in early stages. None of these markets has reached the institutional density that Brazil achieved, which means the business adoption problem hasn’t even had the chance to surface yet.

What would actually move the needle? From what I’ve seen operating in the region, the answer sits outside the regulatory perimeter. Someone needs to build the killer product for small businesses, something as obvious and immediate as Pix was for consumers. The credit use case has potential, but it needs to be packaged in a way that a business owner can activate in minutes and see results in days, not months. Distribution also needs to change. Open Finance adoption won’t scale through bank apps and fintech platforms alone. It needs to reach businesses through the channels they already use: Accounting software, POS systems, and marketplace dashboards. Besides this, the industry needs to stop communicating Open Finance as a technology framework and start communicating it as a specific benefit. “Share your data, get a better loan rate in 48 hours” is a message. “Consent-based data sharing through standardized APIs” is not.

The regulation did its job. The infrastructure is there. But infrastructure without adoption is just a cost. And right now, Open Finance in Latin America is mostly cost, mostly for the institutions that built it, and mostly invisible to the businesses it was supposed to serve. That needs to change, and it will change when someone builds something that makes a small business owner’s life obviously, immediately better.