Interview with Daniel Ruhman, Co-Founder and CEO of Cumbuca
On why the global payments system still lags behind, and what Brazil’s example can teach the world.
Daniel Ruhman describes himself as a “huge payments nerd,” but his journey as a founder goes far beyond that label. A serial entrepreneur and former Latitud fellow, he built his first iPhone app at fourteen. Daniel went on to launch ventures spanning house-cleaning marketplaces, community banking for undocumented workers, and bill-splitting via Pix, Brazil’s instant payments system. Each project led to the next, culminating in Cumbuca, Brazil’s first proxy for regulated ecosystems.
Today, Cumbuca helps financial services firms access the country’s banking infrastructure and launch products faster, serving as a bridge between innovation and regulation in one of the world’s most advanced fintech markets.
Q1. Brazil can be considered an instant payments success story; PIX has achieved near-universal adoption and processed more than 63 billion transactions last year. From your perspective, what made this possible, and what can other countries learn from Brazil’s approach to aligning regulation, infrastructure, and incentives?
A: PIX succeeded because the entire ecosystem moved in sync; regulation, infrastructure, and incentives were aligned from day one. The Central Bank didn’t just launch a technology; it created a framework that made participation mandatory, interoperable, and free for consumers. That combination built trust and created immediate network effects and universal access.
Brazil’s market context helped too. It’s a country of over 200 million people, where two-thirds (66%) use an app to access financial products. A digital-first population meant PIX scaled quickly: as of 2025, it’s used by three-quarters of Brazilian adults and 19 million businesses, accounting for 45% of all payments and one-third of e-commerce transactions.
It’s a reminder that progress in payments isn’t just about innovation, it’s about coordination. When regulation supports innovation and every stakeholder has a clear incentive to adopt, scale happens fast. In less than five years, PIX overtook credit and debit cards combined in transaction volume, representing more than half of all digital payments in Brazil. Other countries can learn from that alignment between public infrastructure and private execution; it’s what turns innovation into inclusion.
Q2. The G20’s 2027 target for improving cross-border payments looks increasingly out of reach. What do you think are the main structural and economic incentives that continue to slow global progress, and how might a system like PIX help overcome them?
A: The slowdown isn’t technical, it’s structural. Every step in a cross-border payment involves intermediaries who each take a cut. As long as funds are in motion, someone earns float revenue, so there’s little incentive to make transfers instantaneous.
Then you have regulatory fragmentation: each jurisdiction has its own rules, compliance processes, and clearing systems and getting alignment across that landscape is incredibly complex. In remittances, fees still reach 5–6% of transaction value, meaning someone sending US$200 abroad can lose US$12 in fees alone.
PIX proves what happens when a single standard brings everyone into a single system. Other countries don’t need to copy Brazil exactly, but they can apply the same principles, unified governance, interoperable rails, and a level playing field. If cross-border systems could agree on common standards, we’d see the same efficiency internationally that Brazil achieved domestically.
Q3. One reason cross-border payments remain expensive is that intermediaries often profit while funds are in transit. How big a challenge are these misaligned incentives, and what would it take for global systems to realign around customer value rather than intermediary revenue?
A: It’s one of the biggest structural problems in finance. Systems like SWIFT and the major card networks were built decades ago around an incentive to hold funds. When a refund takes “up to two months,” that’s not a technical delay; it’s a financial design choice. The longer money sits between sender and receiver, the more institutions can profit from it.
Re-aligning that means removing the incentive to delay altogether. With PIX, instant settlement eliminated the concept of float revenue, so the system naturally reoriented around efficiency and trust. PIX shows how that can work in practice; instant settlement means intermediaries can’t profit from holding funds. It forces innovation to happen in efficiency and experience, not delay. Once you remove the financial benefit of slowness, the system naturally evolves to serve the user.
Q4. Digital platforms and neobanks have proven that instant payments can work domestically, yet scaling internationally remains difficult. How do regulatory fragmentation and the lack of interoperability between payment rails hold the industry back, and what role could Open Finance infrastructure play in fixing that?
A: The gap between domestic and international systems is, for the most part, regulatory. Domestic rails like PIX operate under a unified framework, a single set of rules, one regulator, one infrastructure. Cross-border payments span dozens of those frameworks, each with its own KYC rules, settlement procedures, and compliance models.
Open Finance can help by giving banks and fintechs a shared, permissioned way to exchange financial data securely. That makes it easier to verify customers and transactions across borders without rebuilding compliance every time. But it only works if regulators collaborate internationally, not just locally. The technology is ready, what’s missing is coordination.
Q5. We’re seeing central banks explore digital currencies and tokenised systems alongside instant payment networks like PIX. In your view, how do these two worlds come together? Are they complementary, or are they competing to solve the same problem?
A: PIX changed the economics of payments completely. Once you remove percentage-based fees, you’re no longer monetising transaction volume, you’re monetising reliability, uptime, and scale. That’s a huge shift for banks and payment providers that traditionally relied on interchange or transaction fees.
Cumbuca helps bridge that change. We let companies connect directly to the Central Bank’s APIs using our regulatory credentials, so they can operate as if they already had their own license. That cuts launch timelines from two years to about a month, without the compliance headaches or the dependency on restrictive Banking-as-a-Service models.
That direct connectivity reduces cost, increases resilience, and shortens time to market. In a zero-fee world, the competitive edge isn’t in charging for transactions, it’s in building efficient, compliant systems that can scale without friction.
We’re already seeing this in practice. Global innovators are using Cumbuca’s proxy model to expand in Brazil, building on the same rails as the country’s largest banks. And because clients retain control of their own data, they can scale faster, migrate to their own license when ready, and stay fully compliant along the way.
Brazil’s fintech ecosystem has become a blueprint for inclusion and innovation, and Cumbuca’s mission is to make that infrastructure accessible to anyone who wants to build on top of it safely, efficiently, and at scale.
