⚠ Switching Is Getting Easier

Merchant switching costs are Stone's core defense, and the whole thrust of Brazil's fintech evolution is to lower them. Pix made receiving money free and instant without any acquirer at all; regulatory pushes toward interoperability, receivables portability, and open finance make it easier for a merchant to move balances, credit, and payment flow from one provider to another. Each step chips at the friction that keeps a merchant with Stone, and a market designed by its central bank to be competitive and portable is, by design, one where switching costs fall over time.

Stone's counter is depth: the more of a merchant's operations — payments, banking, credit, software — run on its platform, the harder it is to unpick the whole relationship, portability rules notwithstanding. That integrated stickiness is real and is exactly the strategy. But it is a race between Stone deepening the relationship and regulation making each thread easier to cut, and the regulatory current runs steadily toward easier switching. A moderate, structural erosion of the moat's foundation, driven by the same open, instant rails Pix embodies¹.