Anbima identifies 4 bettor profiles in Brazil and says 4.5 million treat bets as investing

Anbima, the Brazilian association for financial and capital markets entities, has mapped four distinct bettor profiles in Brazil’s bets and online casino platforms. For payment providers, the useful part is not the psychology lesson; it is the scale of a market where millions of users are mentally classifying gambling flows as “investment” money.

1. The study, shared with Valor, found motivations ranging from the dream of getting rich quickly to covering basic expenses. The four profiles are named Adepto da Fortuna, Matador de Leões, Expert da Realidade, and Caçador de Emoções.
2. The first two profiles are predominantly women from classes C, D and E. Adepto da Fortuna covers bettors who expect to get rich quickly through the platforms, while Matador de Leões groups women under greater financial pressure who use betting to pay essential bills such as water, electricity, and rent.
3. Expert da Realidade and Caçador de Emoções are mostly young men from classes A and B. In the first group are users who study the games, develop strategies, and see bets as an alternative to the financial market. In the second are those who came in through friends and treat betting as a hobby to fight boredom.
4. In Anbima’s 2025 Raio-X do Investidor survey, 4.5 million Brazilians said they consider betting a form of investment, out of 28.3 million people who placed at least one bet last year. Marcelo Billi, Anbima’s superintendent for Sustainability, Innovation and Education, said the figure is “almost the number of individual investors in stocks in Brazil today.”
5. Billi’s point is straightforward: if users see bets and investments as the same bucket, payment flows become harder to read, and so does the risk profile around them. He also argued that the right response is not to demonize the platforms, but to explain that games are a hobby and should not compete with investment money. The study also says most bettors understand their chances of winning are much lower than their chances of losing, and that losses and debt are driven more by addiction and compulsion than by lack of information.

For PSPs, acquirers, and banks, the takeaway is operational as much as behavioral: Brazil has a sizable betting user base, and a meaningful slice of it is using investment language to describe gambling activity. That tends to complicate customer profiling, affordability checks, and the way merchants explain transaction purpose to partners and regulators.