Brazil will tighten online betting rules with a new interministerial decree

Brazil’s Secretariat of Prizes and Betting at the Ministry of Finance (SPA-MF) says it will publish an Interministerial Decree in the coming weeks with new rules for online betting. For operators and PSPs, the important part is that the decree goes beyond licensing paperwork: it reaches into platform design, user experience, consumer protection, and game recertification.

1. The SPA-MF announced the measure on 4 August after a meeting with the National Association of Games and Lotteries (ANJL). The government side included secretary Daniele Correa Cardoso and deputy secretary Fabio Augusto Macorín, while the private sector was represented by ANJL president Plinio Augusto Lemos Jorge, legal representatives of the association, and executives from the Brazilian Institute of Responsible Gaming (IBJR). The full decree has not yet been published, and the details available so far are preliminary.
2. The draft framework has two main tracks. One sets technical requirements for online games, which directly affects platform certification. The other covers design, user experience, and consumer protection, backed by a list of prohibited practices. In practice, that means the regulator is not only looking at whether a game works, but also at how the interface pushes or discourages user behavior.
3. Among the planned bans are timers or countdowns that encourage rushed decisions, loyalty schemes that reward only deposit volume, statistics or recommendations that may suggest the outcome depends on user skill, and preloaded amounts on deposit or betting screens. The decree also removes guilt-inducing language when offers are declined, winner leaderboards, real-time broadcasts of other people’s prizes, group-betting chats or prompts, and pop-ups during withdrawal flows.
4. On the technical side, the new rules add four restrictions that will require updated documentation and recertification of each game before the SPA. The secretariat says it is working on a new module inside SIGAP, the system that receives this documentation in Brazil. The rules require a minimum five-second interval between the start and end of each bet, ban autoplay and any spin function without a physical user action, prohibit sounds, lights, or celebratory animations on losing bets, and block features that speed up results or shorten animations, such as turbo mode or quick-stop buttons.
5. The decree also expands player-protection tools. The text visible in the source cuts off at the requirement that the Game Respon... button must be included, so the full set of transparency and responsible-gaming requirements is not yet public. For operators, the key point is straightforward: Brazil is moving from “can this product be certified?” to “does this product behave the way the regulator wants users to experience it?”

For high-risk payment providers, that matters because product changes can trigger re-testing, documentation updates, and operational delays at the exact point where speed is expensive and margin is thin. Brazil is not just adding another compliance checkbox; it is changing the shape of the user journey that sits on top of the payment flow.