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StoneCo (STNE) — moat facet
4.8 million merchants and no concentration to disclose — the exposure is not to any customer but to every Brazilian small business at once.
StoneCo ended 2025 with 4,803.5 thousand active payment clients, up from 4,172.7 a year earlier and 3,522.1 the year before that. Its FY2025 annual report contains no customer-concentration disclosure, no largest-customer figure and no ten-percent threshold discussion1, for the straightforward reason that there is nothing to report. The largest single customer of a company processing R$560.9 billion of volume is a business you have never heard of.
That is a genuinely strong position and it is the opposite of the one several companies in this collection occupy. No counterparty can renegotiate terms, no single failure moves the numbers, and no related party sits at the top of the revenue table.
What replaces concentration risk is correlation risk. The base is composed almost entirely of Brazilian micro-merchants and small businesses — StoneCo's own filing warns that the concentration of clients by geography and economic sector may increase its risk, and lists business closures as a standing source of churn. Four point eight million small firms in one country, sensitive to the same policy rate and the same consumer, are not four point eight million independent exposures.
There is also a second customer type most descriptions of StoneCo omit entirely. The company's filing divides its clients into micro-merchants and small businesses on one side and, on the other, Key Accounts — platform services and sub-acquirers. Those are companies that aggregate merchants themselves, and they are a wholesale relationship with completely different economics.
These four pages take the customer base as it actually is: enormous, small, increasingly banked, and not entirely retail.
The customer base is growing and, more importantly, changing shape: 4.8 million active payment clients from 3.5 million two years earlier, 3.6 million of them now banking clients, and retail deposits up from R$6.1 billion to R$11.1 billion. A merchant who banks with StoneCo is a materially better customer than one who rents a terminal, and the mix is moving that way.
Diversified by name and concentrated in one economy: a Brazilian small-business slowdown reaches all of them at once.
Source: StoneCo second-quarter 2026 earnings release (13 August 2026) ↗- ReportedStoneCo ended 2025 with 4,803.5 thousand active payment clients settling R$560.9 billion of volume, reports no customer-concentration figure, warns that client concentration by geography and economic sector may increase risk, and divides clients into MSMBs and Key Accounts comprising platforms and sub-acquirers.StoneCo Ltd. Form 20-F for FY2025 (CIK 1745431) — active payment clients of 4,803.5 thousand at 31 December 2025, against 4,172.7 thousand in 2024 and 3,522.1 thousand in 2023; TPV of R$560.9 billion, against R$516.2 billion and R$438.3 billion; revenue of R$14,153.8 million and adjusted net income from continuing operations of R$2,477.2 million; more than 3.6 million banking active clients, the majority of whom are also payment clients; retail deposits of R$11,091.0 million against R$8,704.8 million and R$6,119.5 million; a credit portfolio of R$2,836 million with expected credit losses of R$389.7 million, against R$1,207.6 million and R$144.5 million a year earlier; clients divided into MSMBs (micro-merchants and SMBs) and Key Accounts, 'comprised of platform services and sub-acquirers'; StoneCo became in 2017 the first non-banking entity authorised by the Central Bank to operate as an Acquirer through a payments-institution licence, and is among the six largest players by total card volume per ABECS; distribution through proprietary and franchised hubs sold on 'service differentiation as the main driver', digital channels, and more than 500 Strategic Partners at December 2025; per the Central Bank, Pix's share of the total number of transactions rose from 1% in Q4 2020 to 52% in H1 2025 and its share of monetary volume from 1% to more than 26%; the filing warns that 'the concentration of our clients by geography and economic sector may increase our risk' and that the company experiences churn from business closures and account transfers; interest rates directly affect both revenue generation and cost of funds, most third-party funding being linked to the Brazilian interbank rate; StoneCo's own analysis notes that US MSMB take rates have been stable over five years despite penetration around 120% of consumption, and finds no indication of saturation-driven price reductions in Brazilian cities with low cash usage — FY2025 · publ. 2026 · source ↗