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.

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.

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.

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.

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