✦ The Future BetsNarrow moat

StoneCo already tried the ambitious version of its future once. It bought Linx, built a credit book, watched the credit book blow up in 2021, wrote it down, and spent three years rebuilding trust. The bets on this page are what a company does after that: narrower, more measured, and unusually candid about what could go wrong.

The engine is credit. The portfolio more than doubled to about R$3.8 billion on working-capital and government-backed lending, with card, overdraft and secured products following behind¹ — the same product that nearly broke the company, rebuilt with collateral and caution. The structural bet is a single merchant account: unifying the physical card machine with the Pagar.me online suite so a merchant's whole financial life sits in one place, which is how payments companies earn the right to sell banking². The uncomfortable bet is macro, and StoneCo does not pretend otherwise: every 100 basis points on Brazil's Selic rate costs roughly R$200-250 million pre-tax, which is why 2026 guidance of R$6.6-7.0 billion in adjusted gross profit is tracking toward the lower end. And the fourth is simply giving the money back — about R$3.6 billion returned year to date, a distribution yield near 27%.

That last number is the one that reframes the others. A company handing shareholders a quarter of its market value in a year is not making a growth argument; it is making a value argument — that the shares are cheap enough that buying them beats most things management could do with the cash.

So grade this page on credit quality above all. Cost of risk sat at 21.5% with management projecting improvement toward the mid-to-high teens; a credit book doubling while losses fall is the thesis working, and a credit book doubling while losses rise is 2021 again. Watch that alongside the Selic path, because StoneCo's earnings are levered to a rate it does not control.