Brazil's next government will be able to raise the tax on money leaving the country without a vote in Congress, the head of payments finance firm BlackOpal said. Jason Dehni spoke to FM Intelligence ahead of Sunday's presidential runoff.
"It's a decree instrument, so a government can change it overnight," the co-founder and chief executive said in a written interview with FM Intelligence.
The levy matters to brokers because Brazil is the largest source of retail trading interest in Latin America.
The country generated about 3.0 million organic visits to tracked broker and trading-platform websites in the third quarter, about 44% of the region's total, FM Intelligence's heat map shows.
London's trading industry is coming home!
A 2025 Decree Took Most Outbound Transfers to 3.5%
The tax on financial operations, known as IOF, currently runs at 1.1% on investment remittances abroad, 3.5% on international card spending and 0.38% on money coming into Brazil. The rates are set by presidential decree.
The government used that power in May 2025, when the rate on most outbound transfers jumped from 0.38% to 3.5%. Congress voted the decrees down in June, and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes restored almost all of them in an interim ruling in July.
"Either government could move those again and both have used IOF before," Dehni said.
The decree route is not the only lever on cross-border money. The central bank's rules classify crypto-fiat trades as foreign-exchange operations from February 2026. FM Intelligence found no decree changing the IOF rates this year.
Dehni said he sees no sign of Brazilians moving money offshore ahead of the vote. A stronger real this year points to foreign money coming in rather than local money leaving, he said.
Foreign Brokers Take the Local License Route
Three foreign brokers have tried to reach Brazilian clients through a local license in the past 20 months, with different results so far.
Plus500 conditionally agreed on Tuesday to buy Brazilian broker-dealer Guru. The deal would give it licenses from the Securities and Exchange Commission of Brazil (CVM) and the Banco Central do Brasil (BCB).
CFI Financial Group won a securities brokerage license from the BCB in April to offer local equities and fixed income.
XTB got its authorization first, in February 2025, but cited local protectionist measures that October and stopped opening accounts for Brazilian residents in November after ending a local partnership.
None of the three routes is a CFD license. Brazilian individuals traded about 15 million listed derivatives contracts a day in the first half, and that activity runs through the B3 exchange.
Card Deposits Carry a Risk the New Rules Leave Out
BlackOpal buys the future card installments Brazilian merchants sell at a discount, so its book depends on the same settlement chain brokers use when clients deposit by card.
The BCB tightened that chain with Resolution No. 522 in November 2025. Card scheme rules must now pay authorized transactions in full to the merchant even if an acquirer fails, and every sub-acquirer moved into centralized settlement.
Dehni called the sub-acquirers, the smaller processors that settled outside the central system, the historic weak link.
Chargebacks are excluded from that guarantee. "Chargebacks are reconciled after settlement, not on the day," Dehni said, so the final number on a batch arrives with a lag.
BlackOpal said chargebacks on its book have run well below 1% of volume and are absorbed by the originators that sell it receivables.
Mastercard starts extra monitoring of a merchant at a 1.5% chargeback ratio and 100 disputes in a month, and Visa uses the same ratio for its merchant tier in most regions.
The Real Waits for a Finance Minister
The vote itself may move the real less than the first appointments, in Dehni's view.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro meet on Sunday, with Bolsonaro narrowly ahead in recent polls and inside the margin of error. The real traded at 5.01 per dollar at the central bank's reference rate on Tuesday, up almost 10% this year.
"The market has already priced both campaigns," Dehni said. "It is pricing a close result and a fiscally sensible government either way."
He expects the currency to take its cue from the next finance minister and what that person says about the primary budget balance in the first week. He also pointed to two seats on the BCB's board that have been vacant since the end of 2025.
Economists polled by the BCB expect the dollar at 5.13 reais at the end of the year. The Federal Reserve, which raised rates in September, meets on Oct. 27-28. The BCB's rate committee follows on Nov. 3-4, with the Selic at 13.75% after five cuts since March.
This article was written by Damian Chmiel at www.financemagnates.com.
Source: Finance Magnates
