Brazil’s Finance Ministry presses Banco Central to supervise fintechs tied to illegal betting and money laundering

Brazil’s Finance Minister Dario Durigan is publicly pushing the Banco Central do Brasil (BC) to step up oversight of fintechs used in money laundering and illegal sports betting, or bets. For high-risk payment providers, the important part is not the political theatre: the ministry says 37 fintechs show signs of involvement, and the regulatory split over who actually supervises illegal betting keeps mattering.

1. Durigan wants the BC to make a “supervisory effort” on fintechs, saying the issue is tied to laundering and the use of illegal sports betting operations. The statement expands his recent criticism of the central bank, which he has also blamed for high interest rates, calling them Brazil’s biggest economic “bottleneck.”
2. The catch is that, according to Valor, supervision of illegal bets sits with the Secretaria de Prêmios e Apostas Esportivas (SPA), a unit under the Finance Ministry itself. That division was set up after Brazil began regulating the sector under the Lula government from 2023.
3. Brazil’s fixed-odds betting market started operating in 2019 in a regulatory vacuum. Michel Temer’s administration opened the activity, Jair Bolsonaro’s government did not regulate it, and operators ended up running from abroad, often from tax havens, with no operational controls or tax obligations.
4. The Lula government chose regulation over prohibition, mainly to increase tax revenue. It created the SPA and pushed through specific legislation, leaving enforcement against illegal operators under the SPA and the Finance Ministry rather than the central bank.
5. The BC has still tightened the screws on payment institutions. In 2021, it began requiring prior authorization for new payment institutions to start operating; before that, companies could begin business and apply for a licence only after reaching R$ 500 million in transaction volume. Last year, it also moved up the deadline for some unlicensed institutions to apply for authorization from 2029 to May 2026, while increasing capital requirements and issuing technical and security manuals.
6. The Finance Ministry says 37 fintechs show signs of being used in illegal betting and money-laundering operations. That is close to the SPA’s own figure: in October last year, at the 15th Congresso de Prevenção à Lavagem de Dinheiro e ao Financiamento do Terrorismo (PLDFT), hosted by the Federação Brasileira de Bancos (Febraban), SPA secretary Regis Dudena said authorities had identified 36 fintechs with this kind of pattern after analyzing more than 900 participants in the Pix system. Durigan wants the timetable for bringing these firms under BC supervision to be accelerated.

One detail worth keeping in mind: the companies in this set are described as small players, many of them started operating before 2021, when prior authorization was not yet required. For PSPs and acquirers, that is the usual profile when regulators start drawing a tighter line around onboarding, transaction monitoring, and exposure to illegal betting flows.