Juspay and Cumbuca: Unlocking Brazil’s Open Finance APIs

Although Brazil’s Open Finance ecosystem is often described as the most advanced in the world, for many developers, it has remained frustratingly out of reach. 

Despite connecting more than 100 million customers and generating more than five billion weekly communications between financial institutions, only 3% of companies have actually adopted open finance.

Juspay and Cumbuca are now attempting to close that gap with the launch of the Open Finance Playground – an open-source, step-by-step developer guide designed to make Brazil’s complex framework accessible in practice, not just theory.

Positioned as the first hands-on implementation resource of its kind, the Open Finance Playground translates dense regulatory documentation into usable workflows, complete with live API simulations.

From regulation to real-world build

One of the core challenges in Brazil has been the nature of its documentation.

While comprehensive, it was built primarily to meet regulatory requirements rather than developer usability – creating a barrier to entry even as the ecosystem scaled rapidly.

The Open Finance Playground directly addresses this by distilling hundreds of pages of specifications into guided implementation journeys across consent management, payment initiation and data access.

Each workflow is paired with a real-time simulator, allowing developers to see exactly how APIs behave at every stage.

The result is a sandbox-style environment that mirrors production conditions, significantly lowering the cost and complexity of experimentation.

“Open Finance only fulfils its promise when the builders who create value in the ecosystem can actually access it,” says Jonatas Giovinazzo, President Director of INIT.

“Making it faster and cheaper for developers to enter is the most direct lever for closing that gap. 

“The Open Finance Playground is precisely the kind of practical, community-driven resource that accelerates adoption from the ground up, and the type of initiative INIT exists to support.”

A partnership that enables strategic expansion

For Juspay, the initiative is part of its broader strategy in Latin America, where speed to market is often dictated by regulatory navigation.

By operating under Cumbuca’s payment institution licence – acting as a regulatory proxy within Brazil’s Open Finance and PIX ecosystem – Juspay was able to accelerate its entry by 12 to 18 months. 

This has enabled the company to deploy fully operational Open Finance payment capabilities while integrating with global networks such as Visa and Mastercard.

At the merchant level, Juspay is already supporting major Brazilian brands including Latam Airlines and Food2Save, with native integrations for Pix Biométrico and Pix Automático – two emerging layers of Brazil’s real-time payments infrastructure.

Unlocking network effects at scale

Brazil’s Open Finance system has seen rapid acceleration, particularly in payment initiation volumes, which grew nearly fivefold from R$3.2bn (US$638.7m) in 2024 to R$15.3bn (US$3.1bn) in 2025.

Yet industry stakeholders increasingly recognise that scale alone does not guarantee ecosystem maturity.

Developer accessibility – and the ability to build new services on top of infrastructure – is still the missing link.

“Brazil’s Open Finance has extraordinary scale and we’ve only scratched the surface of what it can do,” says Nic Marcondes, Director of Open Finance Monitoring at Cumbuca. 

“The Playground is that missing piece of the puzzle, written by people who have spent years inside the implementation, and released openly because a narrower ecosystem serves nobody.”

The open-source nature of the Playground is central to this ambition. Supported by INIT and open to contributions from across the ecosystem, it is designed to evolve collaboratively alongside the market itself.

“We’ve seen what happens when real-time payment rails reach critical mass, and Brazil is at exactly that moment,” says Shakthidhar Bhaskar, Director of LATAM Expansion at Juspay.

“Open-sourcing what we learned accelerates that. The infrastructure gets more valuable when more people can build on it, and the Playground makes that possible.”