PagBank Brand Guidelines: PagSeguro, UOL, Yellow Card Machines & a 2023 Rename

An online checkout for an internet portal.

PagBank is the name, since May 2023, of the São Paulo payments company long known as PagSeguro. Its investor website calls it “a UOL Group company” — UOL being Universo Online, the Brazilian internet portal — and dates its start to 2006, when, in the company’s words, PagSeguro was founded “to enable secure online payments for UOL users.” In March 2026 Estadão reported that the brand was marking 20 years of activity.

The two Wikipedias tell the beginning slightly differently. Portuguese Wikipedia says the business grew out of BrPay, an online payment platform launched on 1 January 2006 by Sergio Costa, Armando Hilel and Leonardo Pascoal; UOL bought it in January 2007 and on 15 July that year renamed it PagSeguro, with the advertising line “BRPay agora é PagSeguro” (BRPay is now PagSeguro). English Wikipedia instead says UOL formed PagSeguro in 2006 and absorbed BrPay, bought in January 2007, six months later. Both put the business inside UOL from 2007 at the latest.

Early PagSeguro was an online checkout. Shoppers on a site that used it were sent to PagSeguro to choose a card, a bank transfer or a boleto, Brazil’s bank payment slip; sellers without a website could bill customers by email; and the service mediated disputes when goods did not arrive as agreed, Portuguese Wikipedia says. Selling through it cost nothing to join, with fees charged only on completed sales. English Wikipedia records more than 12 million registered users by 2010, and Portuguese Wikipedia says that in 2011 PagSeguro bought BoaCompra, a payments business focused on online games and cross-border sales. In 2008, both Wikipedias add, readers of the magazine Info Exame voted it the e-commerce website of the year.

Yellow machines, then a bank.

The brand’s turn to shops came through hardware. Portuguese Wikipedia says PagSeguro launched a card reader in 2013 that plugged into a phone’s headphone socket, the MINI reader in September 2014 and, at the end of 2014, the Moderninha, a card machine with its own chip and data plan that needed no phone and charged no rent; the company’s own timeline places the Moderninha in 2015. A family followed, by Portuguese Wikipedia’s dates: the Moderninha Pro in 2016, the Bluetooth Minizinha in 2017, the Android-based Moderninha Smart in 2018 and, in April 2021, the PagPhone, a phone and card machine in one.

The machines are yellow. When PagBank took the naming rights to Faria Lima station on São Paulo’s Line 4-Yellow in March 2026, Estadão reported, the bank said in a statement that it had chosen the station partly for the colour yellow, which appears both in the station and in the company, whose card machines are the same colour. The agreement renamed the stop Estação Faria Lima – PagBank and covered its signs, entrances, lifts, escalators, maps and the announcements inside the trains.

The bank side came next. Portuguese Wikipedia says PagSeguro bought control of BBN, Banco Brasileiro de Negócios, in 2019 and launched PagBank that May as a free digital account offering transfers, bill payments, phone top-ups and a card; the company’s timeline lists 2019 as the year of its full banking licence. In 2020, Portuguese Wikipedia adds, PagSeguro bought the Brazilian operation of Wirecard, known as Moip.

The shares had already gone public. PagSeguro listed on the New York Stock Exchange in January 2018 under the ticker PAGS, English Wikipedia says, and the company’s investor timeline also dates its listing to 2018. The company is based in São Paulo and incorporated in the Cayman Islands, according to English Wikipedia.

Design and documentation.

Payment processors and wallets present themselves in more than one place at once. A merchant meets them at the counter and in the checkout, a developer meets them in documentation, and an investor meets them on corporate pages about owners and listings. Each of those surfaces carries the brand in a different register.

At the counter, the brand is often a device. Global Payments, for example, described a modular countertop terminal for its Genius platform in November 2025, with a 15.6-inch merchant display, hidden cable management and stand, kiosk and wall-mount configurations, according to its release. Online, the brand shows up as a list of methods: PayU’s European corporate site sorts its offer into cards and digital wallets, online bank transfers, deferred payments and local schemes such as BLIK.

For developers, processors publish their own entry points. PayU’s Indian site links documentation and an API Playground, and its European site links a Developer Portal and a public status page. The Indian site also lists a mobile app SDK, a software kit for adding payments to apps, among its payment products.

Corporate pages tell the ownership story. PayU’s Indian site describes the business as part of Prosus, listed in Amsterdam and Johannesburg and majority owned by Naspers, while Global Payments’ investor site gives its New York Stock Exchange ticker, GPN, and its releases record deals such as the Worldpay purchase completed in January 2026. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it, and what its own pages say about its products and markets.

Two names joined under one in May 2023.

In May 2023 the two names became one. Portuguese Wikipedia says the company, whose formal name was already PagBank PagSeguro to cover its digital bank and its card-acquiring business, unified both brands under PagBank, and renamed BoaCompra as PagSeguro Internacional. NeoFeed, reporting in August 2023, read the change of name as a clear statement that the former PagSeguro meant to become more of a bank; it counted 6.2 million merchants using its card machines and 10.2 million account holders at the time.

The renamed brand has since been used well beyond the app. Portuguese Wikipedia says PagBank added customer service in Libras, Brazilian Sign Language, in 2023, and in 2024 worked with the toy maker Estrela on a relaunch of the board game Super Banco Imobiliário, in which a toy card machine and cards replace paper money. The Faria Lima station deal of March 2026 put the name on a station the bank picked partly for its importance to Brazil’s financial market; Estadão reported that PagBank then served more than 33 million clients in Brazil, and that the fee and length of the contract were not disclosed.

The investor website now describes PagBank as a full-service digital bank for consumers, individual entrepreneurs, micro-merchants and small businesses across Brazil. It groups the offer into digital accounts, credit for individuals and merchants, card issuing and payments, the last covering card machines, QR codes, payment links and online checkout. It lists the company’s values as client first, protagonism, collaboration, simplicity and reliability.

For a design guide, PagBank shows how a retail payments brand can keep its colour while changing its name, carrying a yellow card machine from a checkout service to a bank. Compare EBANX, another Brazilian payments company, and SumUp, also known for small card readers. For this guide we use a card-machine yellow, a deep green and charcoal with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep PagBank’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.