Itaú blanket-declined rival digital wallets' card payments — CADE opened a penalty case

Top-ups and payments made through rival digital wallets — PicPay, Mercado Pago, RecargaPay — were being declined on Itaú-issued cards, while the same operations went through Itaú's own channels without friction. The refusals came back as generic ABECS return codes with no real reason attached, so neither the wallets nor their users could tell why a transaction failed. Rival PicPay complained to Brazil's antitrust authority, and the Ministério Público Federal filed its own accusation.

CADE's Superintendência-Geral imposed a preventive measure ordering Itaú to stop the unjustified refusals on pain of a R$250,000 daily fine. Itaú fought back with procedure: it demanded access to the evidence file, then filed embargos citing omissions and contradictions — deadlines, who controls the ABECS return codes, banking-secrecy limits. In May 2026 CADE's Tribunal gave it the evidence access but kept the measure, and on 26 May the agency formally charged the bank with abuse of dominant position, opening a proceeding that can end in a penalty Metrópoles reports could top R$27 billion.

On 5 August 2026 the Tribunal unanimously rejected Itaú's embargos and maintained the preventive measure. The ruling's logic was blunt: Itaú must use the standardized ABECS codes accepted by the card networks and explain refusals to consumers and wallet operators through direct channels — a generic code with no justification no longer counts as compliance. The underlying investigation into the payment-systems conduct continues.

R$250,000-per-day compliance fine already running; Metrópoles reports the eventual penalty could exceed R$27 billion.

Wallet top-ups ride on the issuing bank's authorization rails, so the dominant issuer can strangle a rival silently: every decline looks like a routine risk decision.

Generic error codes erase the audit trail. Without a recorded reason, discrimination has to be proven statistically — a much heavier lift for PicPay and the prosecutors.

The asymmetry was the business model: transactions through Itaú's own channels cleared fine, so the declines could not be explained as fraud controls.

Itaú spent its appeals on procedure — evidence access, code definitions, secrecy claims — while the conduct stayed live; each month of delay was a month rivals bled.

Its public posture treated the codes as a technicality ('we don't set the ABECS codes'), which the Tribunal dismantled by pointing to the standard requiring specific, justified refusals.

A dominant gatekeeper that declines rivals with generic codes is manufacturing deniability: if your refusal reasons can't be audited, expect the pattern to be read as exclusion.

As of August 2026 the preventive measure stands with a 30-day compliance clock (set from 27 March 2026) and the daily fine behind it. The full administrative proceeding — opened 26 May 2026 — continues toward a penalty that Metrópoles estimates could exceed R$27 billion. Itaú has not conceded the conduct; it has lost every procedural round so far, including the 5 August unanimous rejection of its embargos.