Inter Pag Taps ACI Worldwide to Scale Intelligent Payments Orchestration in Brazil

Inter Pag, the merchant acquiring arm of Banco Inter, has entered a strategic partnership with ACI Worldwide to modernize its payments infrastructure in Brazil. For fintech professionals, this move highlights the urgent need for legacy acquirers to adopt cloud-enabled, AI-driven platforms to remain competitive in a market dominated by rapid real-time payment adoption.

What was announced

Inter Pag has selected the ACI Acquiring Platform to serve as the foundation for its next phase of growth. The implementation is designed to support the company’s modernization strategy by providing cloud-enabled acquiring capabilities, AI-driven fraud prevention, and advanced ecommerce orchestration. A key component of this rollout is the inclusion of back-office card management capabilities powered by RS2, leveraging a strategic partnership established between ACI and RS2 in Brazil earlier in 2024.

The platform is specifically aimed at helping Inter Pag scale its operations to meet the needs of more than 100,000 small and medium-sized businesses across Brazil. By integrating payments intelligence and analytics, the company intends to simplify its internal operations while increasing the speed at which it can bring new services to market. This infrastructure investment is a direct response to the shifting Brazilian landscape, where digital payments have seen explosive growth. Notably, the Pix instant payment system has reached nearly 170 million users and accounted for 54.7% of all payment transactions in the second half of 2025.

The new system will allow Inter Pag to handle higher transaction volumes and offer a broader range of payment methods, satisfying merchant demand for real-time experiences and more sophisticated value-added services beyond simple transaction processing.

"Brazil has become one of the most dynamic payments markets in the world. The success of Pix, the growth of digital commerce and rapidly changing merchant expectations are accelerating the need for modernization across the acquiring industry. Reliable, secure and resilient payment processing remains essential, but increasingly acquirers also need payments intelligence, AI-driven insights, orchestration capabilities and the flexibility to innovate faster. Modern payments infrastructure is no longer just about processing transactions. It's about turning payments into a strategic growth engine."

Vlademir Santos, head of sales, Brazil, ACI Worldwide.

The companies involved

ACI Worldwide is a NASDAQ-listed (ACIW) global payments technology provider known for its role as an original innovator in the sector. The company provides software solutions that enable corporations to process and manage digital payments, manage fraud, and facilitate real-time payments globally. Its presence in the Brazilian market has been bolstered by its recent collaboration with RS2, a provider of global payment processing software and managed services.

Banco Inter, the parent organization of Inter Pag, is a prominent Brazilian digital bank. Inter Pag functions as its dedicated merchant acquiring business, focusing on providing payment solutions to the SME sector. As the Brazilian market matures, Banco Inter has increasingly focused on technology-led growth to differentiate itself from traditional incumbent banks. RS2, which provides the card management technology for this partnership, is a global player in the payments industry, offering a modular platform that supports the entire payments value chain, from issuing to acquiring.

What FF News has reported before

FF News has closely followed ACI Worldwide’s expansion into high-growth markets and its role in the global shift toward instant payments. We previously covered how ACI Worldwide and dLocal Partner to Unlock Latin American Alternative Payments for Global Merchants, a move that signaled ACI’s intent to dominate the LatAm region. Additionally, the company has been instrumental in European modernization, as seen when ACI Worldwide Powers Rabobank’s Wero Instant Payments, Advancing Europe’s Real-Time Payments Transformation and its broader work where ACI Worldwide and EPI to Power Instant Payments in Europe.

What this means

This partnership is a clear signal that the "Pix effect" is forcing a total overhaul of the Brazilian acquiring stack. When a single payment method captures over half of all transactions in less than five years, legacy systems become a liability rather than an asset. Inter Pag’s move to a cloud-native, AI-enhanced platform puts immense pressure on other Brazilian acquirers who are still tethered to rigid, on-premise hardware. By offloading card management to the ACI-RS2 alliance, Inter Pag can focus on merchant experience rather than back-end maintenance. The industry should watch for a wave of similar "infrastructure-as-a-service" deals in Latin America as firms race to keep pace with real-time consumer habits.