Online betting raises delinquency by 20% and cuts available credit by 16% in Brazil

A study by Insper and Stone, published by Folha de S.Paulo, puts numbers on what high-risk payment teams already know from the merchant side: once users start betting, repayment behavior and credit access move in the wrong direction. The data show a 20% increase in the share of bettors with overdue payments, while banks cut available credit by up to 16% for users entering gaming platforms.

1. The study was led by Sérgio Firpo, a professor at Insper, together with economists from Stone, the banking and payments company. The results were disclosed on Tuesday (8/9) in Folha de S.Paulo. The paper, titled “Apostas Online e Dificuldades Financeiras: Evidências do Brasil”, has not yet been published in a scientific journal.
2. The methodology compared bettors who made their first wager after January 2025, when gambling was regulated in Brazil, with similar people who had not yet played. Transaction data came from Stone’s customer base; delinquency and credit-access indicators came from the Central Bank.
3. Among the bettors tracked, the share of credit card bills in arrears rose 38.7% in the first year after betting began, after adjusting for the change observed among non-bettors. The effect was especially concentrated among users who put large chunks of income into betting platforms: 1 in 10 bettors sends more than 20% of everything that leaves their account each month to bets.
4. The study also found a drop in access to credit. Available loan limits fell by an average of 16% relative to the level before betting started, after controlling for the general evolution of credit in the economy. Rômullo Carvalho, an economist at Stone and co-author of the paper, said this magnitude is comparable to the credit reduction caused by job loss.
5. On the cash-flow side, the data are not flattering for the operator model either: 82.5% of bettors received no money back from the platforms in the first six months of play. For PSPs and acquirers, that is the useful part of the story — not the headline about “betting,” but the fact that gambling spend is showing up in the same banking data that lenders use to price credit and manage exposure.