Hipercard has been discontinued: what this means in Brazil

Hipercard is no longer a payment network. The arrangement closed on 30 June 2025 and the card portfolios moved to Mastercard. If your Brazilian checkout, your acquiring schedule or your PSP configuration still carries a Hipercard line, that line describes something that no longer authorises.

Closure

What happened, and when

Cielo states it plainly in its own changelog: the Hipercard brand was discontinued on 30 June 2025 and Hipercard cards migrate to the Mastercard brand, with transactions on the brand refused after that date and cardholders notified by the brand itself for replacement. CERC, a receivables registrar authorised by the Banco Central, published the same wind-down covering both Hiper and Hipercard, confirming that new volume is captured under the Mastercard arrangement while existing Hipercard receivables remain available until their settlement dates.

The brand survived, the network did not

This is where merchants get caught. Itau still runs hipercard.com.br and still markets a Hipercard Mastercard card, so a customer can hold a card with Hipercard printed on it. Every legacy product on that site now shows as unavailable for new applications. What remains is a marque on a Mastercard, not a scheme you accept separately. There is no discontinuation notice anywhere on the brand site, which is precisely why this passed most merchants by.

Documentation

Your provider's brand list is probably still wrong

More than a year after closure, acquirer and gateway documentation has not converged. Cielo and Getnet have removed Hipercard from their accepted-brands pages. Stone, Pagar.me and PagBank still list it, with PagBank's page stamped as updated in July 2026. Adyen's developer documentation for Hipercard returns a 404 while its marketing page still describes it as a widely accepted Brazilian card scheme. Cybersource still describes it as a domestic credit card scheme in Brazil with no status notice at all. Cielo itself was still adding Hipercard support to its recurring identifiers in April 2025, two months before the brand closed.

The lesson generalises well beyond Brazil. A brand list on a provider's website is marketing collateral, not a statement of what will authorise tomorrow morning.

What it does to your pricing

Hipercard was a domestic, credit-only arrangement with its own interchange and its own acquiring terms. That volume now prices as ordinary Mastercard domestic credit, and the Hipercard-specific line should have come off your acquiring schedule. Whether your effective Brazilian rate went up or down depends entirely on what you were paying before, and no public source quantifies it. That is the point: a rate change arrived through a scheme closure rather than through a negotiation, and a brand enabled once and never priced again is exactly the kind of line nobody checks.

How much volume this actually was

CADE, the Brazilian competition authority, put Hipercard at around 4 per cent of credit card transactions in 2017, down from 6 per cent in 2008. ABECS does not publish brand-level share and never included Hipercard in its monitor, which is fed by American Express, Elo, Mastercard and Visa. So the volume that moved is real but modest, concentrated historically in the north and northeast. The reason to act is correct routing and a clean contract, not lost revenue.

Actions

What to change, in order

Four things, and they are not equally urgent.

First, routing. Confirm that nothing in your Brazilian configuration still sends a transaction to the closed brand, including any bank identification number range mapped to it and any brand hard-coded in your own checkout logic. This is the one that produces declines rather than paperwork, so it goes first. Second, the contract. Get the Hipercard line off your acquiring schedule and, in the same message, ask what rate the volume now takes as domestic Mastercard credit. That question is the point of the exercise: a rate arrived at by scheme closure is a rate nobody negotiated, and the moment to raise it is while you are already writing about the line.

Third, the checkout. Remove the Hipercard logo from your payment selector and from any accepted-brands imagery in your footer or your app. A logo for a network that cannot authorise is a promise you cannot keep, and a Brazilian customer holding an old card is exactly the person who will act on it. Fourth, receivables. If you use a receivables registrar, existing Hipercard receivables remain until their settlement dates, so the registration does not close on the same day the brand does. Check that whoever closes your month knows which of the two dates applies to which balance.

Which payment provider supports Hipercard in Brazil?

None, in the only sense that matters: there is no Hipercard network left to authorise against, so any provider still listing it is describing a brand rather than a capability. The questions worth putting to your provider are whether your Brazilian configuration still routes anything to the closed brand, whether your acquiring schedule still carries a Hipercard line and a Hipercard rate, and what your Brazilian card pricing looks like now that the volume settles as Mastercard.

Pix

Pix is reshaping the market underneath all of this

Pix handled 79.7 billion transactions in 2025, up 26 per cent, and person-to-business volume overtook person-to-person for the first time at over 44 per cent of the total. Pix Parcelado, announced in April 2025 with standardised rules from late October 2025, now offers instalments while paying the merchant in full up front, competing directly with credit card instalments. Parcelamento is deeply embedded in Brazilian retail, and who bears the cost of instalments and how quickly you are settled matters more to your cash position than the headline rate does. A Brazilian card strategy set before these changes is a strategy set for a different market.

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 move straight to cutting your PSP costs, where interchange, scheme fees and markup are separated before anything is negotiated.

Relevant markets: Brazil