A Lei n. 12.865/2013 e o fenômeno dos neobancos, à luz do sistema jurídico brasileiro

Abstract

For some time, the role of the payment system and payment service providers has been to facilitate the circulation of monetary values between economic agents and to provide more convenient, safe, and efficient means of payment than the use of cash. However, since the consolidation of banking activity carried out by modern commercial banks, payment services have been bundled with the banking business model as if they could not be unbundled. This factor also contributed to banks being the protagonists, for a long time, in innovations in payment products and services, such as Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs) and credit and debit cards, so that the system of payments resembled a banking habitat. However, the payments market is among the segments of the financial sector that have undergone the most recent transformations, mainly due to new technologies, innovative fintech business models, as well as regulation in favor of innovation, competition, and financial inclusion carried out by the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB) based on the attributes of Law No. 12,865/2013, which governs the provision of payment services in Brazil. The impacts of changes in this market, however, seem to question the banking business model itself through the so-called digital banks. Arouses greater perplexity and misunderstanding among digital banks the kind of neobanks, companies that do not have authorization to operate by the BCB as banking financial institutions, under the terms of Law n. 4,595/1964, but which would be capable of licitly offering typically banking products and services to retail consumers, albeit through their financial conglomerates. In this context, this dissertation sought to investigate the possibility of recognizing, from a legal point of view, the existence of neobanks in Brazil, in order to examine their legal particularities and reasons for the occurrence of this phenomenon.