Receiving USD payments as a Brazilian company means giving a foreign client an account they can pay the way they always pay, then converting the dollars into reais through a channel Brazilian law allows. The second half is the part that surprises people. A Brazilian company can hold a claim in dollars, but turning those dollars into reais in a Brazilian bank account is a foreign exchange operation with its own rules and its own paperwork.
This guide covers why a US client usually cannot pay your Brazilian account directly, the four routes available to you, how a named virtual account changes the experience, what the conversion step legally requires, what it costs, and when this whole approach is the wrong one. Software companies and agencies end up at the same set of choices as exporters and staffing firms.
Why your US client cannot simply pay you
An American company paying a supplier does it over ACH or a FEDWIRE transfer, from a US bank account to a US bank account, with a routing number and an account number. Your Brazilian account has neither. What it has is an international wire address, which means the payment leaves the domestic system and travels through correspondent banks.
That route works and it is expensive in ways nobody quotes upfront: an outgoing wire fee from the client, one or two intermediary bank fees deducted in transit, a receiving fee, and a conversion at the receiving bank's own rate. It is also slow, at one to three business days, and opaque, because tracing a wire that did not arrive is a phone call rather than a lookup. From your client's side it is worse than paying a domestic supplier, and the friction is real enough that some clients simply prefer a vendor who is easier to pay.
The four routes
Correspondent bank wire. The default. Nothing to set up, the highest cost of the four, the slowest to arrive, and the client has to fill in a form they find unfamiliar.
A US entity with a US bank account. Removes the friction for the client completely, and introduces an incorporation, its accounting, its tax filings and an intercompany flow back to Brazil. For a company of real size this can be the right answer. For a company of ten people it is a lot of structure to solve a payments problem.
A payments platform that collects on your behalf. Marketplaces and invoicing platforms hold funds and remit to you. It works, and you inherit their timing, their pricing and their risk appetite.
A named virtual account in dollars. An account in your company's own name, with US banking details, that receives ACH and FEDWIRE payments and credits the account directly. The client pays as they would pay a domestic supplier. No entity, no correspondent chain. The mechanics of the account itself are in what a named virtual account is.
How the virtual account route actually runs
You complete onboarding with the provider, including verification of the company and of its beneficial owners, and the account is issued in your company's name rather than in a shared pooled name. That distinction is the whole point: a payment from your client arrives with your company as the named beneficiary, which is what the client's own controls and your audit trail both need.
The client pays over ACH or FEDWIRE. The dollars credit to the account, where you can hold them, convert dollars into USDC to move them, or convert them into reais and pay them into your Brazilian account. Many companies hold part of the balance in dollars against dollar costs and convert only what they need locally, which is a treasury decision rather than a payments one. How the two legs connect across countries is described in the corridor explainer.
The step Brazilian law cares about
Bringing the money into Brazil as reais is an exchange operation, and the rules are not optional. Law 14.286 of December 29, 2021 governs the Brazilian foreign exchange market. Its Article 3 restricts exchange operations to institutions authorized to operate in that market by the Central Bank of Brazil. Its Article 4 puts the responsibility for identifying and qualifying the client, and for the lawfulness of the operation, on that institution rather than on you.
Two things follow for a company choosing a provider. The conversion into reais will be booked as an exchange operation by an authorized institution, whoever your counterparty appears to be on the front end, so ask which institution that is. And the documentation supporting the operation, typically your contract or invoice with the foreign client, is something you will be asked for, which means the commercial paperwork should exist before the money does.
The pattern I see most often is a Brazilian software company that has been quietly losing deals and does not know it. One founder told me their US prospects kept going quiet after the contracting stage, and when we looked at it together, the vendor onboarding form was the wall: their finance team had no field for an international wire, and adding a foreign vendor meant an approval the buyer did not want to chase for a mid-sized contract. We gave them a dollar account in their own name and the next two contracts closed without the subject coming up. I bring that up because founders usually describe this as a banking cost problem, and in that case the cost was never the expensive part.
Cost and timing
Receiving the payment. ACH is free to cheap and takes a business day or so to settle. A FEDWIRE transfer arrives the same business day and carries a fee the client usually pays. Both are dramatically cheaper than the correspondent chain, where the deductions in transit are the part nobody sees until the amount that lands is short.
Holding dollars. A balance costs nothing to hold beyond whatever the provider charges, and it protects you from converting at a bad moment.
Converting to reais. The price is the spread against the mid-market rate plus the taxes and fees applicable to the exchange operation, which your provider should itemise. The USDC to BRL page shows the live rate for the stablecoin leg of that conversion.
The round trip. For an established flow, a client's ACH payment can be reais in a Brazilian account inside a business day, most of which is the ACH leg rather than anything downstream of it.
When this is not the right approach
When your business genuinely operates in the United States, with US customers, US staff and US contracts. Then a US entity earns the overhead it costs, and a virtual account is a bridge you will outgrow.
When you need to hold large dollar balances over long periods for their own sake. That is a treasury and banking question, and a payments provider is not the right home for it.
When your clients pay by card. A virtual account receives bank transfers, and card acceptance is a different product with different economics.
When the contract requires a local presence. Some enterprise procurement rules ask for a domestic vendor rather than domestic banking details, and no account solves that.
Doing this on Lumx
Lumx is stablecoin payments infrastructure for businesses that move money between Latin America and the rest of the world: one API to collect, hold, convert, and pay out in BRL, MXN, COP, USD, EUR, and GBP or in USDC and USDT, over local rails such as PIX, SPEI, PSE, ACH, FEDWIRE, SEPA, and Faster Payments, with SWIFT and on-behalf-of payments and collections (POBO and COBO) in USD, EUR, and GBP, plus named virtual accounts, custodial wallets, and KYB/KYC built in.
A Brazilian company on named virtual accounts gets a dollar account in its own legal name, reachable by ACH and FEDWIRE, plus the euro and sterling equivalents where the client base needs them. Incoming payments land as a balance you control, with a webhook event carrying the sender and the rail's own reference, so reconciliation against an invoice is a lookup rather than a bank statement exercise. From there you hold, convert, or pay into a Brazilian account whose CNPJ (the Brazilian company taxpayer ID) we validated when it was registered.
Verified on September 25, 2026. Operational context, not legal, tax, or investment advice.
Cover photo: ThisisEngineering on Unsplash.
Do I need a US company to receive USD payments?
No. A named virtual account gives a Brazilian company US banking details in its own name, so a client can pay by ACH or FEDWIRE without an incorporation on your side. A US entity solves other problems, such as local contracting and hiring, and those are the reasons to open one.
Can a Brazilian company hold dollars?
It can hold a dollar balance with a provider and be paid in dollars. Converting those dollars into reais inside Brazil is an exchange operation that, under Law 14.286/2021, must run through an institution authorized by the Central Bank, and your provider should name that institution.
How long does an international payment take to arrive?
Over a correspondent bank wire, one to three business days, with fees deducted along the way. Into a virtual account, an ACH payment settles in about a business day and a FEDWIRE transfer the same day, and the funds show up as a balance with the sender identified.
What documents will I be asked for?
Company registration and CNPJ, the identification of beneficial owners, and, for the exchange operation, the contract or invoice that supports the payment. Preparing the commercial documentation before the first payment is the single best way to avoid a hold on it.
