Thiago Alvarez

1/ 🇧🇷 Brazil quietly built the world’s largest regulated Open Finance stack: • 103M active data-sharing authorizations • 68M linked accounts • ≈4B API calls/week • ~R$1.2B/month in payment initiation (and just starting) All of this only happened because of Guiabolso, a startup I founded with Ben Gleason. In the Central Bank’s 5-year Open Finance book, I told our story 🧵

Some thoughts about this: 1) For now, we haven’t seen very complex software being built overnight through vibe coding, but it’s probably a matter of time before that really starts happening 2) It’s easier to copy the general idea of a software, but the corner cases, the very specific workflows, is much harder and it’s usually hidden to the general public 3) If your premise is correct that you could copy 5 years of code very fast in a dorm room, wouldn’t it also apply to the code that you are shipping daily as you are learning from clients and market?

Always believed in the potential for real world impact of AI sora.chatgpt.com/p/s_68dcbd37f2…

18/ Future Brazil proved regulated Open Finance can scale. Next steps: - Improved Open Finance for businesses - Credit portability – Lower costs for small players – Cross-border interoperability – Exporting Brazil’s know-how – AI-ready APIs & digital agents transacting for us Brazil is showing the world what’s possible. 🌍✨

17/ Open Finance in action Users can schedule recurring payments — like a gym membership — directly from their account through Open Finance rails. No manual transfers. Just clean, automated payments.

1/ 🇧🇷 Brazil quietly built the world’s largest regulated Open Finance stack: • 103M active data-sharing authorizations • 68M linked accounts • ≈4B API calls/week • ~R$1.2B/month in payment initiation (and just starting) All of this only happened because of Guiabolso, a startup I founded with Ben Gleason. In the Central Bank’s 5-year Open Finance book, I told our story 🧵

13/ Reinvention & exit Guiabolso pivoted to B2B: providing data & tech to banks/fintechs. Started negotiating large deals. 2021: Guiabolso was acquired by PicPay. By 2023, when my earnout ended, PicPay was Brazil’s largest Open Finance payment initiator & top data recipient.

11/ Central Bank engagement 2016: we pitched our lending model to BC. They encouraged us to form an association. We created ABCD (Brazilian Association of Digital Credit) with other fintechs. 2018: regulation introduced SEP (peer-to-peer lending) and SCD (direct credit company) licenses. A milestone in modernizing credit.