01 · The setup
The most expensive money in the world
Brazil runs a benchmark Selic rate of 14.25%, having recently held at 15% — its highest since 2006. That is roughly three times the U.S. policy rate, and among the highest positive real yields on earth.1 For most investors, punishing rates are a warning. For a manager of illiquid credit, they are the entire opportunity: when risk-free money is this expensive, the spreads on assets that are hard to price and slow to sell widen far beyond what any developed market offers.
High rates also do something structural. They push companies and households into arrears, force banks to shed portfolios, and turn distressed and defaulted credit into a steady, growing supply — exactly the raw material an illiquid-asset manager underwrites.3
Wide spreads are not a flaw of the Brazilian market. They are the reward for organizing what no one else will — and illiquidity is where they concentrate.
02 · The market
Too big to ignore. Too complex to organize by hand
Brazil’s financial system holds more than R$7 trillion in credit.2 Beneath it sits a deep well of illiquid, document-heavy assets. The market for assigning non-performing loans reached roughly R$30bn in 2024, and Deloitte projects assignments will grow 73% to R$52.3bn in 2026.2 Court-ordered government debt — precatórios — is estimated at up to US$100bn outstanding, with annual payments set to exceed R$120bn.45
And these are only the visible layers. Venturial’s first thesis — stalled labor-claims credit — sits on an estimated ~R$900bn of value, of which less than 1% is organized into investable form. The assets exist; the infrastructure to price and move them does not.
R$52.3bn
Projected NPL assignments in 2026
US$100bn
Estimated outstanding court-ordered debt (precatórios)
~R$900bn
Stalled labor-claims credit · <1% organized
03 · The inefficiency
The friction is the moat
What keeps this capital trapped is exactly what makes it valuable. These assets live in court filings, PDFs and case histories, scattered across thousands of jurisdictions and priced case by case. Traditional managers meet that complexity with headcount — expensive, slow and impossible to scale.
An agentic manager meets it with a system. Intelligent agents read, price and diligence documents at a fraction of the cost and a multiple of the speed — Venturial triages a case for about R$9 versus roughly R$400 outsourced, some 44× cheaper — while human judgment holds every high-stakes call. In a market defined by document friction, whoever industrializes the reading wins the pricing.
04 · The rails
A deep, regulated, fast-maturing capital market
This is not a frontier experiment. Brazil is among the world’s ten largest fund markets, with assets under management around €1.6 trillion and industry net worth of R$10.8 trillion.67 Alternatives now make up 21% of the fund market, up from 13% in 2020,8 and the credit-rights vehicle purpose-built for illiquid assets — the FIDC — grew about 10% in the first half of 2025 to R$687bn.7
Regulation modernized alongside it. CVM Resolution 175 rebuilt the fund framework, and structures like the FIDC give a manager a proven, supervised wrapper to hold court-linked and distressed assets. The rails to organize illiquid credit already exist — they are simply waiting for an operator built to use them at scale.
Earn the spread while it is wide. Become the infrastructure as it compresses.
05 · The window of opportunity
Why now
Rates are elevated but expected to ease over the coming years.1 That is the window of opportunity. Today’s spreads are extraordinary and today’s supply of distressed and stalled credit is expanding. A manager that organizes these markets now captures outsized returns while the gap is wide — and, in doing so, builds the pricing data, the origination network and the operating system that become the market’s infrastructure as returns normalize.
Brazil is where the model is proven — the hardest, highest-yielding version of a problem that repeats in every large economy: personal-injury and tax-lien claims in the United States, insurance-linked credit in the United Kingdom. The same agentic core, pointed at the next illiquid niche. Brazil is the proof. The world is the prize.
Read the full thesis with us.
hello@venturial.com.br