Cumbuca

Cumbuca is a regulated payment institution licensed by Brazil's Central Bank that provides a thin proxy layer for companies to connect directly to the Pix and Open Finance ecosystems. Instead of applying for your own payment institution license and building all the regulatory infrastructure yourself, you plug into Cumbuca's proxy. It acts as a transparent bridge between your infrastructure and the regulated ecosystem — the Central Bank, banks like Itaú and Nubank, and the Open Finance APIs. Nothing gets abstracted or stored; your data and your operation stay under your control.

How does it work? You sign requests with your own keys and send them to Cumbuca's endpoint. The proxy re-signs them with regulatory certificates and forwards them 1:1 to the official APIs — same payload, same response, just a different host. The architecture is built on Erlang/OTP for high throughput and low latency (P50 overhead is negligible), and it supports all major Pix modalities: payments, recurring payments, sweeping, and Pix Automático. You also get 1:1 access to Open Finance data endpoints for accounts, credit cards, investments, and the raw SCR credit data from the Central Bank.

Who should use Cumbuca? Fintechs, payment companies, and any business that needs to offer Pix payment initiation or access Open Finance data in Brazil without the burden of becoming a regulated institution themselves. The zero-lock-in approach means you can eventually get your own license and switch out Cumbuca without rewriting a single line of code. Use cases include initiating Pix payments via Open Finance consent, aggregating account balances and transaction history for credit analysis, and pulling SCR raw data for risk scoring.