Accepting boleto in Brazil

Boleto bancário is the Brazilian payment slip: the customer receives a document with a barcode and pays it at a bank, an ATM, a lottery agent or through their banking app. It has been a fixture of Brazilian commerce for decades, and it is now being displaced by faster rails.

Settlement

Boleto does not settle at checkout, and that breaks assumptions

The order is placed but the payment happens later, often days later, and frequently never. A foreign merchant treating a generated boleto as a completed sale will misreport revenue, reserve stock that does not need reserving and record abandonment that is actually non-payment. Any Brazilian operation using boleto needs an explicit expiry and release process rather than a card-shaped one.

Pix Automático is taking the recurring use case

When the Central Bank of Brazil launched Pix Automático on 16 June 2025, its financial system organisation director stated plainly that boleto would be overtaken by Pix Automático for automatic payments. Boleto moved BRL 6.2 trillion in the prior year according to the banking federation Febraban, so this is displacement at scale rather than at the margin. Existing bank direct debit arrangements were named as likely to be disrupted too, because they required company-by-company bank agreements that smaller merchants found burdensome.

Reach

Where boleto still earns its place

Boleto retains genuine reach among consumers without cards or smartphones, and in a country where roughly 60 million people hold no credit card that is not a trivial segment. The judgement is not whether to remove it but what share of your Brazilian volume genuinely needs it, and whether customers who could pay instantly are being routed to a slip because the checkout offers it first.

Succession

What replaces boleto is not one thing

The displacement described above is real and it is not a single substitution. Boleto is doing three different jobs in a Brazilian checkout, and each one is going somewhere different on a different timetable.

The recurring job goes to Pix Automático, which needs a consent flow you do not have today plus handling for a consent the customer can revoke at any moment. The one-off cardless job goes to ordinary Pix, which needs nothing at all except that the checkout offers it first and clearly. The instalment job goes to Pix Parcelado, which is a commercial decision about who bears the cost of instalments rather than an integration task.

So before deciding anything, split your Brazilian boleto volume into those three. Merchants who treat this as one project do the easy third of it, declare the migration done, and leave the recurring and instalment volume sitting on a slip for another two years. The split takes an afternoon, and it tells you which of the three is actually worth building.

Which payment provider supports boleto in Brazil?

Cielo and PagBrasil in Brazil, alongside EBANX and dLocal, all document boleto, among others, as do the Brazilian banks and payment institutions. The useful questions are the cost per boleto issued versus per boleto paid, your unpaid rate, how long you hold stock, and what proportion of boleto customers could have used Pix instead.

Per paid

Issued or paid: the fee you compare is not the fee you pay

Boleto is usually priced per document issued. Pix is priced on transactions that actually happen. That difference sounds administrative and it silently rewrites every comparison anyone in your business has made between the two.

Work it through. Suppose your provider quotes 0.90 euros per boleto issued and your unpaid rate is 20 per cent. To collect 5,000 paid orders you issued 6,250 documents, which cost 5,625 euros, so your real cost is 1.13 euros per paid order rather than 0.90. That is 25 per cent above the quoted figure, it scales directly with your unpaid rate, and no invoice presents it that way, because the invoice is counting documents while your accounts are counting sales.

Two things follow. Ask your provider whether you are billed per document issued or per document paid, because both models exist and the answer changes the number. And restate every comparison you have made against Pix in cost per paid order, because on the issued model an unpaid boleto is not simply a lost sale, it is a lost sale you paid to generate.

Reviewing what this costs you

What you pay is set in your agreement, not by the scheme. Start by establishing whether you are overpaying your PSP, or look at how a structured payment RFP settles market coverage before you sign rather than after.

Relevant markets: Brazil