I had the opportunity to witness up close the fintech boom in Brazil. I saw the financial system, once dominated by five major banks, shaken up by agile startups, payment gateways and, more recently, the crypto universe. Technology pulverized money, but taxation on the financial system remained a tangle of IOF, PIS/Cofins and rules that nobody quite understood.
But, once again, Resolução CGIBS nº 6/2026 moved to bring order to the house. And it did so by creating a specific, heavy and detailed regime for financial services. Let us examine it.
Chapter II of Title VI of the resolution levels the playing field. Traditional banks, foreign exchange operations, insurers, supplementary pension funds, factoring, securitization, payment arrangements and even virtual asset services (cryptocurrencies) now operate under a unified logic of IBS incidence.
Would this finally be equity applied to the financial industry?
The great challenge has always been: how do you tax a financial transaction where the "price" is not explicit? How do you levy a tax on a bank spread or on the margin of a credit operation? The resolution addresses this by establishing specific calculation bases for these operations, deducting financial expenses and funding costs. This appears to be a sophisticated model, one that attempts to capture the real value added by the financial operation rather than merely the volume of money in transit. And when I say sophisticated, I immediately think of something more complex.
For the market, the impact is very significant. Fintechs, which operate on squeezed margins and high volume, will have to recalibrate their pricing algorithms. Payment gateways and market infrastructure providers, which live on microfees, will feel the weight of the new compliance requirements. And the crypto universe, which for a long time rode on the absence of clear rules, is now officially inside the IBS tax framework. Anyone opposed to capitalism and banks must find this wonderful. We simply cannot forget, however, that once again, higher tax collection, more complex calculation processes and more sophisticated taxes tend to penalize the end user rather than the intermediary. In other words, those who use the financial system will foot this bill. Or worse still, those who use the services of someone who uses the financial service will pay the bill. So, invariably, the loser is the end point and the final consumer.
And I never tire of repeating that even so, these developments require further specifications. The complexity of money always creates gray areas. What is still not entirely clear is how, in day-to-day practice, the financial base portion will be calculated in highly complex structured transactions. The precise taxation of certain operations involving decentralized virtual assets (DeFi) remains a technological unknown. The practical operationalization of all this, at the level of detail the tax authorities will require, still depends on supplementary regulations and a great deal of adaptation from banking systems.
Money became code. And the tax authorities updated theirs. The era of the digital financial "wild west" is coming to an end. Competition will no longer be solely about who has the best credit or payment technology, but about who can operate with the greatest tax efficiency within the new regime. One guarantee I can offer, though: no financial institution will go under. What we may start to see is a higher cost of money. Who gains and who loses from this? We all know the answer.
Article originally published at GazzConecta.
