The Hidden Cost of Financial Inclusion
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Bright yellow cards. No annual fees. A smooth digital app that promised simplicity in a country where banking is often intimidating.
The mission was clear: bring lower-income Brazilians — especially those in the C and D income brackets — into the formal financial system.
And it worked. Millions joined. For many, that little yellow card was their first credit product. A symbol of trust and access.
Behind the scenes, Will Bank was expanding fast. The fintech, backed by Banco Master, built a portfolio heavy on consumers with thin or no credit history. Every swipe, every installment plan, every late payment carried weight on its balance sheet.
Then the numbers started to tell another story.
According to Valor Econômico, Will Bank now lists R$ 5.1 billion (roughly US $900 million to US $1 billion) in receivables from payment transactions, a figure that caught the attention of Brazil’s financial press and regulators. It wasn’t just the amount.
It was the question behind it: who owns the risk tied to those receivables?
Was it the issuer — Will Bank itself?
The acquirers handling card payments?
Or the merchants and fintech partners downstream?
The lines weren’t clear. And that lack of clarity has reignited a debate that goes beyond one digital bank.
Brazil’s card ecosystem has long thrived on inclusion and innovation but much of it rests on complex partnerships and funding arrangements. When defaults rise or liquidity tightens, everyone feels the strain.
The Will Bank case has become a real-time stress test for how well the country’s financial inclusion model can hold up when credit risk scales faster than the safeguards around it.
The cost of inclusion
Financial inclusion is often celebrated as progress. More people in the system. More access.
But inclusion built on credit can easily become debt with a nicer interface.
This is something Emmanuel Daniel warned about in our Emerging Markets Today episode, Financial Inclusion: The Good, The Bad, and The Controversial.
He argued that when fintechs onboard the unbanked into venture-capital-driven models, they aren’t empowering users.
True inclusion, he said, happens when financial systems are built from the ground up — as Grameen Bank once did in Bangladesh — keeping both assets and liabilities local. Emmanuel added:
“For so long as we think of financial services as something that needs to be put on platforms and monetized, the whole idea of financial inclusion is a
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