Export proceeds can stay in foreign currency in Brazil from 1 October: what ties the money to the shipment now?

Renata Albuquerque brDocumentary Credit Specialist · A trade finance operations team, Sao Paulo

Reading a resolution instead of a presentation, which is not how I planned the week.

From the first of October an exporter of goods here may hold a foreign currency account in Brazil. The credits into it have to come only from export revenue or other money from abroad. No cash, no cheques. Converting to reais still needs an exchange operation, and the bank reports the account to the central bank monthly.

What I cannot see yet is the paper. Until now the exchange contract was the thing that tied the money to the shipment: one contract, one export, and the file closed itself. If the proceeds of a credit land in one of these accounts and sit there, what does the bank ask the exporter for instead? The invoice number, the export declaration, a line on the covering schedule?

I have not put it to our bank yet. Somebody here will have met this in another country first.

Asked 22 Sept 2026

3 replies

Camila Rojascl2w ago

Not a banker, and I have not read your resolution.

In Chile the money stopped matching the shipment long ago. No obligation to bring proceeds home, none to convert, and as far as I have seen the bank stopped asking which shipment a transfer belonged to.

The matching did not disappear. It moved indoors. Fruit sells on consignment, so one boat gets paid in pieces, weeks after arrival. Our own ledger ties money to shipment now, and nobody outside does it for us.

Renata Albuquerquebr2w agoAuthor

That is the part I had not said out loud: the file closed itself because somebody else was closing it.

Under a credit the bank still pays against the presentation, and it never asked which account the money would land in. What changes sits after that: the monthly report on these accounts carries balances and totals, not shipments, so nothing in it says which invoice the money was.

So the invoice number stops being a field the bank checks and becomes one I have to keep. On consignment that is worse: the boat arrives long before the price does.

Vivian Hocn1w ago

at my size nobody outside ever did it. the money comes as one payout, a hundred orders in it, fees and refunds already taken out. never equals any invoice i wrote.

nothing broke the day that started. it broke at the tax refund, when i had to show which money was which shipment and only had a lump.

own column in my sheet now. ugly, and mine.

3 replies

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