I can see that Visa and Mastercard are freaking out, not because Pix can take over their business model, but because it can give ideas to other countries doing the same.
I've spent three months earlier this year in Brazil and never used Pix once. Not because I didn't want, but because I couldn't, or let's be honest: my time was not worth the hassle. To be able to pay with Pix, one needs to get a CPF (Brazilian Tax ID). Then to open a bank account, mostly local banks only accept Pix, with which you can tie your CPF. It's possible but it's definitely not straightforward the slightest. All the while Visa and Mastercard work everywhere in the country, I almost never had to pay in cash, even some sellers in the streets accepted regular credit cards.
Pix is certainly great, but locally only, and if every country comes with its own system and Visa or Mastercard disappear, we are going to go back to how people used to travel 50 years ago: with a lot of USD bank notes hidden in your hotel room or elsewhere ...
Pix is a good local idea, but the world needs something better.
That's exactly what's happening, see the EU digital euro scheme. It's planned to be free of fees too, modeled around how SEPA was done for wires.
There has been massive resistance by the incumbents of course, including banks (since they too charge a fee on top of visa).
It's been in the backlog for years but the US sanction against ICC judges leading to them being cut off from most things including payment triggered a renewal of it.
That's what I am afraid of. The resistance from the incumbents plus the external pressure from the US (and China?) might be to strong. Better go with a federated approach, mandating all the different payment apps available all over the EU to allow connections from other participants.
In any case, the digital euro seems to take years (earlier expected date is 2029). I don't understand why it takes so long.
From what I remember the bank started to federate around a payment network to outcompete the digital euro. I hope the digital euro wins, I hope they don't fumble it.
The European Payments Initiative (Wero) made the mistake of only aiming for Peer-to-Peer QR code payments, carefully avoiding competing with cards so each country could keep their card schemes (Cartes Bancaires, Girocard etc). I don't think it will ever even _compete_ with cards in the near future.
- Switzerland hasn't gotten Apple to open up NFC payments at the same conditions as the EEE, at least not yet.
- Twint is part of the EMPSA which hasn't really delivered anything tangible. On the contrary there's now a real push from EPI and EuroPA to make Wero interoperable with non-Eurozone networks. Hopefully Twint will get on board too.
- Transaction fees are on the higher side, consequently merchants don't have any reason to push Twint or disincentive debit card payments.
> Twint is part of the EMPSA which hasn't really delivered anything tangible.
It's easy to see why. Both Swish and Vipps is part of EMPSA. In Sweden, everyone uses Swish. Vipps (from Norway I believe) wants to expand to Sweden but no one is using it since it's not compatible with Swish. So making it compatible would potentially hurt the business of Swish.
Regulation is needed. Otherwise it will never happen.
If EPI / Wero reach a critical mass then hopefully this will change, as non-Eurozone countries will have a direct interest in making the local mobile payment solution accept the one used by an area of 350+ million people.
Then the EPI protocol could become the least common denominator and you might be able to use Vipps, Twint, Blik... in Sweden? I believe similar scenarios are happening in Asia around Alipay and UPI, for instance I think I can use the Korean Kakao Pay on a payment terminal in Japan, because both sides are compatible with Alipay+.
There is India's UPI (launched in 2016), Singapore PayNow (Launched 2017) that works in a similar way. And they also work across each platform.. UPI users in India can transfer to Paynow users in Singapore and vice versa.
> To be able to pay with Pix, one needs to get a CPF (Brazilian Tax ID).
There are third party apps you can use to pay with pix using a credit card, can't recall that name, but read about it here a few months back, on another pix-thread.
> CPF (Brazilian Tax ID). Then to open a bank account
Getting a CPF is absolutely trivial, but I'm not sure you can open a bank account without RN/RNE, at least not with local banks. Can probably manage with one of the online banks.
I think you need a RN/RNM to open a bank account even with online banks - I haven’t tried all of them of course so there might be some that work with cpf only
Calling a CPF a "tax ID" is a bit misleading, much like calling an SSN "the way you get social security benefits". You can (even as a non-citizen) get one in a couple mins at the post office, and it's used for literally everything, including things like buying a SIM card or registering for some public WiFi hotspots.
Okay, that's quite a bit less bureaucratic than American EIN, ITIN, or SSN (collectively known as TINs).
How many digits/letters long is it? One problem with American TINs is the entire space is only a billion digits, so it's not possible to assign one to every person in the world. If we could add two more digits or make 3 alphanumeric, it would be a lot more feasible to do this, but that is basically impossible at this point.
Yeah, if I wanted to pay the crazy spread on currency exchange, I’d use my credit card instead.
10 years ago I was still traveling with a bunch of $100 banknotes and reading blogs to find the most honest shady currency exchange place with good rates wherever I went. Fun times!
I even paid for two! iPhones in cash back then!
Today? I just stop by an ATM and withdraw some cash, everything else goes contactless on Wise.
Sure. It might have been different in other places but when my folks took out traveller's cheques in the nineties to travel to e.g. the caribbean the 'cost' in the form of a slightly worse currency price wasn't a serious issue, in part because ATM fees/exchange rates were way steeper than piecemeal exchanging the cheques for local cash. Getting a bank to reissue cheques was easier than replacing a card too.
Some destinations were probably cash friendly, i.e. no one would scope you out for theft, but that's not the kind of travel I had in mind. I'm actually not that familiar with that kind of travel, I've mostly travelled on a budget or to less touristy places.
Frankly, the number of people that care about no-phone functionality is tiny. I bet the greatest preference is the other way: the ability to use it without a physical card. Everyone has a phone.
Of course you need a backup at some point, but it’s just that: a backup.
The stated objective of this initiative is to break free of the American Mastercard/Visa duopoly. It would be pretty fucking stupid that if replacement required the use of the American Apple/Google duopoly!
Convenience of use with your phone is one thing. Requiring a (locked-down, attestated) phone to create an account is another thing entirely.
Well .. How did you register to MercadoPago? I never was able when I was in Argentina (end of last year). It also asked me for some official IDs in Argentina which is even harder to get than a CPF (or probably impossible as a non-resident, I didn't bother at that point)
> To be able to pay with Pix, one needs to get a CPF (Brazilian Tax ID).
It's not ideal, but you can use Wise to pay using Pix and India's UPI. You simply transfer the money from your local bank account to Wise and they transfer to whatever Pix you tell. It's almost instant.
Meanwhile, there are talks about integrating these systems. This is the obvious long-term game, a clear threat to Visa and MasterCard.
Right now in Brazil the only advantages of using a regular credit card are the cashbacks and convenience to use contactless. The convenience is going away -- Pix now supports contactless payment, but it's not widely accepted yet.
In contrast, I had great support the one time I contacted them. Have used them in business and personally across a number of different accounts with no problems.
Another advantage is anti-fraud measures and remedy (chargebacks). This (BTW clearly AI-generated) article mentions some fraud thing they're working on (Special Refund Mechanism), so we'll see how long it takes for that to take effect.
For now, I'll be using our Canadian not-quite-Pix called Interac to pay small amounts of money to people I trust, but I won't any time soon be buying a fridge with it, or booking a week-long cottage stay on a website I've never used before.
Canadian here who's not familiar with Pix; is Interac a pretty close comparable? If so, it's not the end-all answer for exchanging money for goods & services, but great in a small subset of transactions.
It's not run by a central bank and not mandated, but it "organically" became standard for banks and many vendors to support it. I hope they find a good way to combat fraud and the fee differential will make it more frequent for vendors to offer a discount for cash/Interac (or an extra charge for credit cards). It used to be common, then got banned, and is now allowed but uncommon. I for one don't really want to use an American credit card, but the fact that I get 1.5% cash back and fraud protection is a fairly strong incentive.
tbh even cashback these days might be worthless. It need to be a considerable amount. Because most things you buy, you have a discount when buying with Pix or money...
What still make credit cards strong in Brazil it's installments though...
Wero is a private effort, the digital euro is closer to Pix but it keeps being stalled (given the article in question, one could make some guesses as to why).
Most European countries I frequent already have their own local equivalent to Pix. In Spain almost everyone has Bizum, and not uncommon for vendors at markets to accept it too, Sweden has Swish which is the same deal for the Swedes. I think this lists the most prominent ones that are in wide usage today already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Mobile_Payment_System...
> Pix is a good local idea, but the world needs something better.
There is no problem to continue using maybe Visa/Mastercard when dealing abroad or external, but when you are a normal citizen, it's far better to use Pix in this case, you are supporting a national company, paying fee's to them and not at the whims of an external countries policies.
Edit: They also tend to be non profits ironically enough.
In Ireland many years ago there was a system called "Laser" which was very similar, the only reason it was changes was for 'convenience' but in reality it was because Visa and MC had taken over all the POS market, and so Laser cards couldn't give cash back. So the banks just folded.
I can't wait to see Europe being some competition to the duopoly that is Mastercard and Visa.
Europe spends way too much time and money on various Fintech pet projects. There's the Digital Euro and then there's Wero and Target and a bunch of other shit that doesn't reach consumer scale usage or attention.
> in reality it was because Visa and MC had taken over all the POS market
Do you happen to have any insight on this? I mean, how is it that one or two companies can manage to squeeze everyone else out so completely? If two big players control Point of Sales (POS), shouldn't someone be able to come in and make a business out of underselling the competition? I would think that smaller overhead means smaller margins are needed.
I've talked to small businesses about fees and charges for their POS and they are always thrilled when people pay with cash, because it means they get the full amount. (These conversations have come up because I've run small businesses in the past, and I remember how horrible it felt to "sell" something for $30, only to get like...$5 out of it between fees, taxes, and insurance costs. It seems like every business I've spoken to hates Visa and MasterCard with a passion, so I would think that small business would be thrilled to have a new player.
At a guess, I would think that part of(?) the reason may be due to (and rightfully so) whatever regulations are in place to force money transfer companies into meeting certain security ratings or whatever. Even so, surely there are people that are willing to fight for a piece of the action, right? It seems crazy to me that no one else sees that as an opportunity to do it better. I'd really like it if fees for small-to-medium businesses could be dropped entirely, and it was only the major players that offset the costs for everyone else.
Europe already has plenty of alternative card systems e.g. France's Cartes Bancaires (CB) and ironically Germany just last year turned it's Girocard/Maestro system off in favour of Visa/Mastercard; the problem is the banks in individual countries in Europe are not willing to give up their control in favour of a compatible standard.
> I can see that Visa and Mastercard are freaking out, not because Pix can take over their business model, but because it can give ideas to other countries doing the same.
Oh they absolutely will. And the US government will come to their aid.
Consider the case of Bombardier [1], a Canadian airplane manufacturer. Boeing was caught with its pants down by Airbus with the A320/321 and panicked into making the 737MAX. Boeing has a captive audience with US airlines and the 737. A shared type rating is a massive advantage for Boeing but the economics of the Airbus narrow bodies were just too good.
Then along comes this Canadian companiy who saw an opportunity to create a narrow body commercial jet in this range (100-150 seats) and some US airlines were interested. To avoid this Boeing offered United a deep discount to not buy the CSeries and Bombardier responded with discounts of their own.
What happened? Boeing then went to the government and accused Bombardier of "dumping" as well as having goavernment subsidies. This is particularly funny if you know anything about the billions in subsidies Boeing gets from both Washington state and the federal government. The US governments made complaitns to the WTO and ended up imposing a 300% tariff on Bombardier, effectively killing that business. It eventually became the Airbus A220.
Free markets, by the way.
The US will punish foreign companies for competing on price by abusing process and treaties, ignoring it whne it's inconvenient, use tariffs with flimsy excuses, punish unrelated industries to apply pressure and otherwise bully other countries for daring to compoete.
Being American companies is unacceptable. So is doing anything that serve as a model to any other country that might threaten an American monopoly or oligopoly.
So prepare for accusations of government subsidies and the US applying pressure in unrelated areas because of this.
As an aside, the US does this with governments too. "Oh, you wanted to profit from your own natural resources and use that money for the benefit of the people? I think not. Look at this system of government that isn't working. Nevermind that we're starving it with brutal economic sanctions. It doesn't work. Look away. Nothing to see here."
Lovely how China is now beating the Americans in their own game. And the reaction is predictable: accuse the Chinese of being a threat to National Security and stop them from taking over the American market after they have already taken most of the rest of the world. Eventually, Americans will be the ones paying the price for the overly protectionist policies of their government.
Other countries adopting it is already happening. I live in Bolivia, and a few events made QR payment systems widely used across the country. I have family in Peru, and it is a similar case with Yape, another QR payment system. In Bolivia, fintech companies also offer integration with Pix in Brazil without the need for a CPF to send and receive payments. Since we are neighbors, this is very handy.
China's UnionPay and AliPay are to various extents are integrated with the systems in Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia [1]. Each country has its own system, but integrates with others.
Does Pix have an equivalent of a prepay debit card? That seems like the most logical easy setup.
If you must have integration with identity, just tie it to whatever visa or proof of arrival. Last I went to Mexico they were issuing QR codes for inbound travelers.
I wonder if I showed up (as a foreign visiting) in the US how long it would take and what kind of documents would it take to have a Visa/Mastercard. I guess it would be the same as having or even longer to have your CPF issued and a digital account here in Brazil.
Pix isn't intended (yet) for foreigners to use. It's mostly for local Brazilians, and here it's brilliant: free for personal use, really fast (frequently instantaneous, has a 10 second limit), and accessible (every major bank and most of the smaller ones supports it).
I can understand why Visa and Mastercard are worried. Apple is as well, since it refuses to support Pix in Apple Pay, which is mandatory in Brazil. But honestly? Fuck these companies. (Sorry about my French, I couldn't think of another way to put it.)
Lots of countries around Brazil are taking pix. Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay.
And you can totally expand the idea. The fact that you need national id for pix doesn’t mean the idea “doesn’t scale.” It means the current implementation of it is not focused on use by visitors.
I really don’t understand what you’re getting at, it seems like a pretty narrow view of the possibilities.
Meanwhile US citizens are using paper (cash and cheques) for lots of transactions. Or one of the big credit card corporations.
Visa and Mastercard already are a single point of failure (see e.g. the French judge that cannot use it anymore because the US government did not like it when he did his job). This way, there'll be at least two points of failure.
VISA an MasterCard have Credit Cards. Pix is just a way to transfer money you have in your bank account. In europe we can do that with IBAN. It goes from one account to another. In Argentina we have something similar in all banks. What is unike from VISA and MasteCard, at least untill now, is the Credit part of it.
Lots of other Asian countries already did something similar, e.g. Singapore had PayNow QR Codes (probably the closest to Pix) since 2017, Thai PromptPay was even earlier and India UPI (slightly different wallet system) since 2016. China was even earlier but different though private superapps.
What has changed, and I find interesting, is that Card rails are more and more used for political pressure [1], and I feel the "American hemisphere" is probably the reason Pix gets more of this pressure than Asian countries.
There is nothing preventing PIX from going global (just like VISA/MC). If you look at the history of domestic systems e.g. China Unipay, India UPI/Rupay, Japan JCB they started off as local systems and went global.
Japan JCB is Internationally accepted. China Unipay is also considerably "international" i.e. internationally accepted and India's UPI/Rupay card is adding new countries at a fast clip. The reason most people "don't know" whether they can pay with China Unipay or India's Rupay is because they are not advertised with the same logos as VISA/MC on acceptance sites.
However both China Unipay and India's Rupay through their partnership with Discover Card (now owned by CapitalOne ) are accepted anywhere Discover card is accepted
The place where these "domestic" systems haven't quite measured up to VISA/MC is the issuing side i.e. the entities controlling these systems currently do not allow foreign banks to issue cards with their logos or use their network to settle the transactions. If you're in the US, you may not get a Unipay or Rupay card from a local bank. There are multiple reasons for that, some strategic some political.
It will be interesting to see how they evolve over time. In spite of the exponential rise of PIX , UPI and Unipay, VISA and MC themselves have been doing remarkably well in the past 10-20 years. Unlikely either of them will go belly up.
People underestimate how difficult it was to transfer money before Pix, even between local banks. The process was hard to use, it could take days and the fees were huge, depending on your bank. Pix solved all these problems.
What happens also is that many sellers provide discounts when using Pix, because you dodge the expensive fees charged not only by Visa and MasterCard, but the fees operators (banks, fintechs) charge to provide the infrastructure (PoS machines, financing for installments, etc, the last one being quite common in the country) to use these networks.
I think we need to put this in context for folks who are not from Brazil.
Comparatively, a domestic bank wire in Brazil before Pix was already easier and faster than one in the US today. I don't recall the bank fees being bad either.
The issue is that bank wires were never designed for buying lunch at the food court. They're not instant and not user friendly to set up.
Pix is alien technology next to the stuff we have in the US.
It sounds a bit like the Dutch Tikkie with the QR codes and instant transfer. Of course, in the EU most bank wires are already free when using SEPA, and often nearly instant as well. This Tikkie thing is a way to easily create a payment request for people who can't be arsed to simply carry cash (and raise the country's resilience to system failure in the process).
Brazilian living in NL, experienced in both. I think biggest difference is Tikkie doesn't give you an easy identifier. Great for privacy, but being able to send money to your email/phone number makes a difference for some real time use cases. QR code helps, but it is not the same.
Since last year, all EU banks have to support SEPA Instant Transfer, both receiving & sending, at the same price as a usual transfer (Instant Payments Regulation 2024/886)
If only https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPC_QR_code supported a sepa instant bit so that one could just show a qr code, scan it with whatever payer banking app and authorize the sepa instant payment.
This is what Ideal/Wero does. Because this is the standard for webshops in the Netherlands (and rapidly expanding to the whole EU) the only gap left to fill was that of consumer-to-consumer transfers with just a QR code to scan. Tikkie I mentioned above solves that well enough in the Netherlands, although that bank-run app is horribly laden with stupid ads and deals you can't seem to turn off.
Speaking as a non-expert, I think Pix has much bigger scope. Pix is account-to-account. One can buy real estate, pay bills, make person-to-person and business-to-business transactions, government payments, recurring payments. The funds also settle instantly.
Most people don't experience the full scope of Pix which is impressive.
The credit card companies really missed the boat here to become the standard for consumer to consumer payments. Of course, from their perspective, they know that people would not accept having to pay for this service so the companies won’t go near it.
Sounds like pix is very similar to the Swedish swish. Phone numbers are used for identity, payments are instant, businesses often have qr codes with their identity etc..
As is the dominant e-ID platform, because our politicians are fond of bank cartels.
It kind of works and Swish does too, unless they're down which happens every now and then, but there is room for improvement that would be easier realised as a public sector endeavour.
The entire problem solved by Pix is an artificially created obstacle put in place so banks can charge for something they do for free.
The article doesn't mention China's digital renminbi, but it is similar, including the aspect of being offered by the country's central bank.
Rather than this looking like "Alien tech" in the US, it's just another example of things in the US looking more like stone age tech to the rest of the world.
Like banned chinese EVs, and a pushback on solar electricity generation, all of these are manifestations of the US government primarily making it easier for multi-billion $$ multi-national corpses to filch the general population.
This isn't just the orange cheato, it's been the policy of every modern US administration, with the backing of the majority of the legislature.
And for some reason, the plurality of voters seem to be in favor.
Pix is ok - but it’s clunky to use and has a single point of failure.
On the former - paying is:
Unlock phone
Launch app
Authenticate
Choose to pay with pix
Scan QR code
Enter amount
Authenticate again
Wait
Payment made
Show cashier your phone
Which is considerably more involved than a contactless payment.
On the single point of failure side of things - I was at an event in Brasilia a month or so back, pix grinds to a crawl, taking 10+ minutes per transaction, and the drinks queues rapidly got out of hand. As nobody accepts cash any more, and because nobody has a card any more, this meant they sold practically no drinks.
So it ain’t bad but tbh passing bits of paper back and forth is still easier.
Doesn't seem too different from QRIS in Indonesia, authentication is relatively painless since some apps offer either pin or fingerprint. Being open standard (multiple banks, electronic wallet and payment gateways support it, multiple payment apps support it, all interoperable) probably help since there's never any delay I've experienced for years, and this system is handling from small payment on roadside hawkers to electronic purchase in large stores both offline and online.
More fancy payment flow are also available, such as vendors generating one-time QR code that already include the payment amount, and the user apps generating one-time QR code that the vendor scan, thus switching some of user steps to the vendor.
In most cities I've lived and visited, using QR is far more convenient than paper. Good luck using contactless when most phones don't support it, and even when Visa & MasterCard pushed their contactless standard, I never encounter a single vendor with a working machine (this range from small shops to large hypermarket). Maybe because they have bigger MDR than QR, but from customers PoV contactless simply don't work, until QRIS also adopt NFC and suddenly it's workable (but not widespread yet since most phones still don't)
There's Pix contactless payment. Both Samsung and Google wallet support. Samsung added a few weeks ago. Google added 1 or 2 years ago.
You can actually pay QR Code Pix now with Samsung by just opening the camera too.
Apple refuses to implement Pix on Apple Pay, and regulatory agencies are trying to change that...
Pix integration with Google Pay it's just amazing.
Imagine the situation in the US as if every app or website magically used Google Pay.
Well, that's Brazil now if you use Android. Because as soon as you copy a Pix code, it will prompt Google Pay :) And every service in Brazil have Pix... Even international ones as Stripe supports...
USD is a hard currency unlike the BRL. It is not supposed to move that fast by design. Google “Regulation E”. Brazil has no such strong provisions for protecting unauthorized transfers out of your account
I worked in a bank in Brazil in the early 2000s. Bank transfers were always easy and relatively quick. At worst, transfers would happen overnight during a national event called bank compensation where all banks would sync up with the Central Bank.
Pix solved a bunch of problems and made all of the above quicker and easier, but Brazil has been at the forefront of banking systems for a long time.
We had TED, but it was not instant, nor was it free. It only worked on working hours and took a maximum of 1h, still better than American banks, though. QR Codes is also a big deal.
The deployment of PIX was also really well executed, if it took too much I'm 100% sure that Visa and Master would've made it worse. Being quick was a wise decision
> We had TED, but it was not instant, nor was it free.
Not instant, but pretty close for the time. It might not have been free but most basic bank packages had a bunch of TED transfers included. For everything else, there was still DOC which would happen overnight and was either free or cheaper than TED.
I'm not dissing Pix in any way. Pix is probably the most advanced transfers and payments system in the world, and I'm 100% with you on how well it was (and still is) executed.
I was mostly responding to:
> how difficult it was to transfer money before Pix, even between local banks.
It was certainly not.
I remember being in the UK a couple years after I was on that bank, and being shocked at how primitive everything related to banking was. Transfers would take days or even weeks and would be incredibly awkward to make. Cheques were the quickest way to transfer money between people - other than cash, obviously, but that was not always desired.
A few years later I visited the US and it was even more retrograde than what I had seen in the UK all those years before.
Several backs had a good amount of TED limit. Although everything changed when Nubank launched, giving unlimited TEDs to everyone. Most banks followed at the time, so basically around 2015~ several big banks had unlimited TEDs.
The problem with TED it's just how hard it was to send money.
You had to insert, if I recall right:
- Person full name
- Social security number
- Select the Bank Name
- The type of account (savings or checking account)
- Agency and account number
This basically means that TED was used as a serious payment thing, like money you receive from your company, etc.
I won't dispute you or even cassianoleal, but compared to how was US in 2005 (just barely finishing check/que digitalization), Brazil is indeed faster in this forefront (and it enabled the creation of Pix in the first place).
Speaking of the forefront the UK has had interbank realtime payments (Faster Payment) since 2008. It also used to have something like Pix, i.e. bank account referenced by user's phone number called Paym from 2014, until it was discontinued due to lack of demand in 2023. Faster Payments is still operational.
> People underestimate how difficult it was to transfer money before Pix, even between local banks. The process was hard to use, it could take days and the fees were huge, depending on your bank. Pix solved all these problems.
Nearing 17:00 in a bank: Does anyone here need to do a TED or a DOC? Come to attendant now before the system shuts down for the day!
When I tell that I used to withdraw cash at the ATM in one bank, cross the street, deposit the CASH in another bank ATM people think I am crazy. But I was doing monthly that circa 2014, all to avoid paying ~3 USD transfer fee (what was called a DOC/TED).
In Brazil your employer kinda chooses which bank they use and you kinda have to open a bank account with them to get paid, but it is hardly worth it to move your credit card to another bank. This is why my salary came in one bank and my credit card bills came in another.
Sorry that you wasted time but - it was wasted time!
"Salary portability" is ensured in Brazil by the Banco Centra, at least since 2006. Employees can receive salary in any bank account they choose, even if their employer processes payroll through a different bank.
Considering the times we're living in, each country should consider implementing own payment system, and never abandoning cash for digital currency. Both systems should coexist and complement each other but we aren't living in a perfect world.
Absolutely. The US has shown it is happy to threaten allies and weaponise everything it can in international relations. It would be madness to leave critical payments infrastructure dependent on the US.
Absolutely. Look at the Portuguese Empire: even at the end most Portuguese were poor and many had to emigrate.
Most British had a low standard of living going into the XX century. Engels' report to Parliament painted a bleak picture of the standard of living in Britain at the peak of the British Empire.
> Since 2022, Mastercard Brazil’s CEO, Marcelo Tangioni, has voiced his concerns: “Pix is great, beneficial for the industry. What’s not great is that it falls under the Central Bank. It can’t regulate and compete at the same time”.
Why not? This is such an American point of view that sounds similar to why the IRS doesn't offer easier tax filing options.
Whenever people start arguing about inefficient government they should be reminded that pix costs like 10M USD a year to run. An absolute bargain for what it delivers.
It can't really, but public services don't necessarily need competition. In fact it can even make sense to run them at a loss.
And alternate payment methods are allowed, so if there was space for a private entity to offer a better/cheaper service they could. But it is hard to compete with a fully integrated (mostly) free service.
It is worth noting that despite all this cheap sovereignty talk from Brazil’s president, in practice Brazil would not be able to operate Pix at that scale without heavily relying on American hyperscalers companies.
Brazilian institutions are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to US cloud
providers, specially AWS, to be able to process that many transactions.
Earlier this year, when sa-east-1 was down, major banks were forced to suspend Pix payments for nearly 3 hours. When this happens, some people are literally not able to buy anything because that’s their only payment method. So much for
“President Luiz Inácio Lula da
Silva proclaiming a nationwide campaign: “Pix is ours, my friend”.”
Don’t get me wrong, Pix has been a great success and a major achievement, but all this adversarial political talk between the US and Brazil administrations is really cringe, both countries are better doing business together.
> It is worth noting that despite all this cheap sovereignty talk from Brazil’s president, in practice Brazil would not be able to operate Pix at that scale without heavily relying on American hyperscalers companies.
> American companies are great to do business with.
US officials involving themselves in your national market because they are unhappy with the market share of their companies in it, with the implicit threat of stopping other areas of trade if you dont allow the companies to gain a larger market share makes US companies too untrustworthy to do business with. If Trump implements a trade ban for Brazil, will these hyperscalers continue providing the service at their own risk, or are they going to prioritize their state over their customers?
I would assume the answer will be the latter.
Given that, I believe it is in Brazil's (and most other states) best interest to divest and reduce partnerships with companies operating in the US
> US officials involving themselves in your national market because they are unhappy with the market share of their companies in it
Just to clarify, for anyone who’s been paying attention to the matter, it’s clear that the true reason for that Section 301 investigation is not due to Pix stealing market share of MC/Visa. In fact, if you check Brazil’s central bank own data, Credit Card usage has not gone down since Pix came in. What Pix really replaced was physical cash.
Don't get me wrong. But mentioning Brazil's president on this meter just adds even more politics to the discussion. Which global systems don't depend somehow on US infrastructure?
Do you have the same opinion about the European leaders that are creating/created cloud infrastructure?
I believe just one of the parts is really into adversarial talks lately. Brazil is just following what other countries are also doing.
> But mentioning Brazil's president on this meter just adds even more politics to the discussion.
This quote is literally from the linked article — he is mentioned there
> Do you have the same opinion about the European leaders that are creating/created cloud infrastructure?
I don’t understand the question, I think it’d be great to have an European AWS equivalent just for the sake of competition, but as far as I know, we are very far from that
As long as the foreign companies operate within the country under the country's laws, it shouldn't be a big problem. But being dependent on only one vendor and not having redundancy in the system is a problem though. This is why cash is important to provide the ultimate redundancy against all technological and infrastructural failures.
This is just a legacy of the hopefully-soon-to-be past. We all went way to hard on the aws bandwagon (myself included). I worked for a bit in the past for a company doing 100 mio. API requests daily off of 6 boring old servers.
There is no explicit need for AWS in this. But it was probably easier to build since it is what we are used to.
Context is important, the Brazil's President said that about USA investigations with allegations that Pix is a "unfair business practices"[0] he is not at all saying that Pix is "100% powered by Brazil", in his political proselytism he does make clear that Brazil and USA are partners by centuries and should keep being.
Please, he literally went on national TV on Brazil’s Independence day to claim that
“We will defend PIX from any attempt at privatization. PIX belongs to Brazil, it's public, free, and will remain so.”
Lula has been historically hostile to the US for ideological reasons.
He’s done plenty to undermine that relation, stemming from attacking the dollar dominance, ignoring Iran sanctions, to indirectly financing the Ukraine war by becoming the largest buyer of cheap Russian oil — and that’s why we have those investigations going on
Most of these could could be put another way as protecting sovereignty (and that would be the most charitable interpretation IMHO). Examples:
- "being hostile for ideological reasons" becomes entirely warranted when you consider the many CIA regime-change operations in the past.
- "Undermining the relation" (with the US) is just being smart about how much dependency one has on external factors, like exchange rates and infrastructure.
- The "investigations" are political posturing. PIX is not "unfair business practice", its a modern, cheap, state-of-the-art payments system that is better than what private businesses like MasterCard and Visa are willing to offer. I can think of plenty of ways they could offer actual value to customers so they can still be relevant. The fact that they don't, and chose to try and lobby against it tells me that its a lot cheaper to just buy some politicians and manufacture some controversy instead.
> The "investigations" are political posturing. PIX is not "unfair business practice"
Agree
> its a modern, cheap, state-of-the-art payments system that is better than what private businesses like MasterCard and Visa are willing to offer. I can think of plenty of ways they could offer actual value to customers so they can still be relevant.
This is a common misconception. Pix is a form of bank transfer, not a full blown payment infra like MC/Visa. They are different products, Pix doesn't make credit cards irrelevant.
Per BCB statistics:
In 2020, before Pix implementation, credit cards accounted for 2% of the monthly BRL volume transacted (~ 200M BRL)
As of 2025Q4: credit cards still accounted .... for the same 2% (~ 800M BRL)
The main question is: historically, why haven't credit cards been more popular in Brazil, even before Pix?
You'll find your answer looking at structural issues (high interest, delinquency rates, bad credit offerings ...), not technical concerns
What went down were apps from banks that use PIX, not the core infrastructure.
That is responsibility of the banks. It means private banks like Itau and Nubank rely on Amazon, not the Central Bank. They relied on those hyperscalers for their operation, and their gateways went down with it.
PIX has sovereign, private infrastructure on brazillian soil managed by Banco Central. NIC.br and other essential services do the same.
This is a minor technicality, if private banks are down then the SPI is basically useless. Banks can send money to each other but clients can’t see it.
> What went down were apps
Plus, this is an oversimplification.
Transaction authorization, Fraud/AML screening, account validation are not just part of an “app”, they are core functionality of private banks operations, and they are made scalable by big cloud providers.
The true scaling burden is on private banks not the BCB
> The true scaling burden is on private banks not the BCB
Exactly. That is one of the aspects that allow for the system to be sovereign and scalable. Banco Central controls the core, and that's all it needs to.
This is good design. Descentralized, modern, resilient and efficient.
That is an offshoot topic which is, in my opinion, irrelevant for the sovereignty discussion.
I'm here just to clear out the confusion regarding the infrastructural pieces. The core PIX is undeniably sovereign and state-owned, and the Amazon downtime was lack of resilience on the part of the banks (which they could have totally designed around but decided not to).
> I'm here just to clear out the confusion regarding the infrastructural pieces. The core PIX is undeniably sovereign and state-owned
Sure, I can see the confusion, I should have made that clearer.
Let me rephrase it: the "core PIX" is mostly an implementation of ISO20022 (pain,pacs, etc) messaging on top of HTTP APIs and BCB's own ledgers, plus a centralized KV datastore (Dict).
The implementation was excellent, but there is no technical moat in the "state-owned" part of the solution
The biggest technical challenges were, by design, delegated to the private sector, heavily relying on US hyperscalers to achieve Pix's operational requirements.
There is a wide misconception that state stuff needs to be fully state-developed. I don't subscribe to that view. Delegating and designing just-enough simple solutions, avoiding bureaucratic tanglements, is an immense challenge and done beautifully in this case.
The other direction (not using standards, owning parts you don't need) would make it for slower adoption, lots of new government responsibilities and very few additional sovereign control. It would be worse.
Building a "technical moat" is for companies which have direct competition. The state can solve this by making regulations. It doesn't need that technical moat, simplicity is better suited. It's acting exactly at the intersection it needs: in the regulation, delegation and coordination realm, not execution.
Yes, but my point was more nuanced, I didn't mean to say that the state needs a fully owned solution.
The original article opens up with "Pix is igniting a geopolitical and commercial battle."
The point I was trying to make, specially in the last paragraph, was that: Brazil doesn't really have full control, or the capability, to operate Pix without US infrastructure. Therefore, it is not smart, to engage in a geopolitical, ideological battle against the US. If Brazil wants to tough it out and claim sovereignty, then it must be willing to walk away and build its own infra.
Case in point: the recent US-Canada tensions were enough for the Canadian government to consider cancelling the purchase of American-made F-35 fighter jets.
Is the Brazilian government willing to do the same? Is it even in its best interest to do so? In my opinion, no, hence the aggressive anti-US rethoric from Lula must stop
Brazil has not started in any ideological battle regarding this. It has developed a national technology, and it allows other payment systems to coexist peacefully in the spirit of honest competition.
The ideological and geopolitical provocations comes from the US. The government is merely defending itself, and being decisive about our sovereignty is not an act of aggression. It's just good statesmanship.
The phrase "PIX is ours" wasn't even directed at the US. It was promoted because a previous Brazilian president tried to attach is personal name to the technology. It was later adopted in that defensive posture, but it was never about fostering any grievances with other payment systems.
Data centers are a commodity, and the US gets tremendous revenue from Brazilian businesses that use it (fourth largest AWS customer location). It's a symbiotic relationship, and there are other countries able to provide computing power if we need to cut ties with it. If that happens, businesses can rent those from somewhere else.
You underestimate our ability to handle these things. Watch us.
Funny annecdote: I have a friend who worked at iFood (brazilian food delivery company) and apparently they moved their entire AWS stack to us-east-1 because sa-east-1 did not have enough capacity to handle the load they had. This is why iFood has a very high latency* during user interactions.
I guess this is largely equivalent to Qvik in Hungary.
- Instantenous transfers (<5 sec hard requirement, usually sub-second) between local banks,
- All local banks must implement support (not sure about the deadline, system is working reliably since a few years),
- money can be sent or requested (needs approval, of course).
- Primary IDs (bank account numbers) and optional secondary IDs (Phone number, email address) can be used
- Supports QR codes for requests,
- Free from any transfer costs for private people (not sure about companies) under 20M HUF (~50k EUR).
It is implemented using an Erlang according to my information, and is a very robust, well designed and tested scalable system.
You actually have many alternative money transfer systems around the world.
Like Qvik you mention, UPI in India, Blik in Poland, and Swish in Sweden.
Even cross border systems like Revolut pay.
Surprisingly the first system started with MPESA in Kenya. Showing that innovation can happen Africa, and does not need to limited to Europe or the USA.
+SBP in Russia with similar qualities. Russia also implemented compatible Visa/MC backbone which allowed friction-less migration after both companies left country at 2022.
It's surprising that Visa and Mastercard are even private companies. I expected that the government would be in charge of money and not let a group of people impose a 1-3% tax on their population. In the US, credit cards account for "71% of nationwide retail sales dollars".
Governments aren't competent enough to do tech stuff well and they would never make something that works in a different country as well as credit cards do, but still.
> a group of people impose a 1-3% tax on their population.
It seems the consensus is that a taxes are only bad if you have to pay the government. If it's a small set of companies that collectively own a virtual monopoly, it's because they earned it.
Most countries have some kind of bank wire system that is in charge of the money itself. Cards are pre-authorization system. The movement of money is authorized when you swipe the card, but not actually moved until up to a few days later, through the existing bank wire systems. If there's a currency conversion involved it can be even trickier.
Consider that the largest payment card network on Earth (China UnionPay, 7 billion cards) - decided it was easier just to bootstrap acceptance in the US by a partnership with Discover rather than connecting directly to merchants.
If you want a new scheme to work, distribute something like social security and welfare cheques through it. That immediately forces broad acceptance.
Isn't US EBT card on the same payment network as credit cards? That doesn't count as an independent system. The same set of "they" as Visa/Mastercard gets the fee.
It is not only "their" population. Mastercard and Visa captures a % of each sale done globally with their cards. It is perfectly reasonable for all countries to want to develop their own payment systems and stop paying taxes to the USA.
> It's surprising that Visa and Mastercard are even private companies.
Asianometry provides a great summary as to how both of them came to be: For Visa, a 1976 rebranding of the BankAmericard program. For Mastercard, a 1966 meeting of banks as opposition to BankAmericard.
> Governments aren't competent enough to do tech stuff well and they would never make something that works in a different country as well as credit cards do, but still.
There's some counterexamples: Postal systems, GPS and the internet were started as government projects that now interoperate and cover almost the whole globe.
The Swiss nation bank and other central banks should also do something similar. They are loosing control to private foreign corporations which decide what you can and can not purchase. Not based on laws but on risk.
One of the jobs of the SNB is to enable payments. But because most people are using digital payments now they are loosing this ability and control.
If you get sanctioned by the US you loose access to all digital payment systems. In Switzerland where access to a bank account is a right written in the law you can only use one bank (Postfinance) and this bank has to limit you to basically a useless account (No wires, no credit cards etc.) because even the internal digital payment system (Twint) touches some US system.
Visa is trying hard to take over Japan at the moment and it's painful to watch. I'm really rooting for Pix, because the Visa MasterCard monopoly isn't doing us any favours
Visa and MasterCard are basically redundant except for international transactions. We already mostly use QR code payments, which is a semi-open standard and somewhat vendor agnostic(with caveats). It works internationally.
Japan has it's own card companies, and payment systems. Recently, some train lines have started adding support for Visa, but trust me that if you use it in rush hour you will be considered a knob head by everyone behind you as contactless is much slower than the native cards and can't keep up with a fast walking pace. Of course part of the problem here is Sony being greedy and making the international adoption of Felicia hard, but it's complicated.
The cards are most useful for tourists, and the best argument to introduce cards is international compatability. But international interop doesn't have to look like this, it's just how the playing field ended up looking.
Last, Visa and MasterCard are both known for being strict on what goods and services they are happy accepting, and it's not ok that so much power is consolidated in two entities in one country.
I'm not an expert on payment systems, but when I see the large scale advertisements Visa especially are pulling off in Tokyo I see a foreign company trying to disrupt and gain market share while not really benefiting locals who do have mostly moved beyond the need for card payment. I.e my reaction isn't "yay, finally Visa is here too save me" it's "oh no, how will they disrupt and destroy"
India's UPI is also extremely quick and easy to use - instant transfers with just the person's phone number or via a QR code or via a UPI id which looks like an email id.
We are talking about 19-20 billion transactions per month.
Apart from UPI, there are other interbank transfers methods such as NEFT, IMPS, RTGS etc. All quite convenient and easy to use.
I can see the usability aspect, but using an insecure protocol like SMS for something like payment sounds like an absolutely awful idea.
RCS might work as it's a bit more secure (and more importantly: doesn't have a 2G/3G compatible version that criminals might trivially abuse); it even has an optional money sending API in its protocol.
In EU we have multiple national systems, but now they are trying to unify them to the IBAN system, so you can pay in the same way by opening your bank app and scanning a QR code:
Wero sounds similar to the US Zelle system but the big reason for that to exist in the first place is that bank account numbers are not safe to share in the US since they can be used to pull payments so there was never an option for easily transferring money to friends and family other than writing a cheque.
In the UK and Europe I could just share my bank account number or IBAN and make payments through online banking since the late 1990s (though in the UK they only became instant in 2008.) So Wero sounds like a nice convenience but much less of a game changer.
It will be interesting to see if it manages to expand to goods and services since the EU strictly regulates the fees Visa and Mastercard can charge there so there is less incentive to switch than in some other countries.
That's a very reasonable concern, though given how central Visa and Mastercard are I suspect it is probably necessary to regulate their structures within the EU so that intra-EU payments are not reliant on non-sovereign infrastructure.
Sharing banking information is not safe in Europe, decades ago a phone scammer convinced me to give them my information and they were able to pull money from my account without any permission from me whatsoever, they just acted like I already signed up to their scam service when I never did. That was a completely foreign and insane idea to me (and it is still insane and should not be allowed) that someone can simply withdraw money from my account. They sent me some contract in the mail that I had to apparently reject and otherwise it was automatically approved. Which itself is surely also not legal but the point is that they were able to take money from my account just with my information.
Granted, I'm mostly familiar with the Scandinavian bit of Europe, but you can't do jack shit with banking without 2FA which is tied into the national population register.
They decided in the 80ies or 90ies that "relying on knowing secret fixed magic numbers" was not ideal for authenticating people, and sat down and worked out solutions to that problem.
There's still the SEPA direct debit payments in Germany, so you basically give your bank details and the company takes the money out of your account once a month. These don't exist in Scandinavia, but are very much still the norm in Germany.
In the UK direct debits don't require 2FA (but do require approved forms either online or on paper) but you can also very easily get a refund for any direct debit taken from your account so I assume it's simply not worth the scammers' time.
The way SEPA direct debit mandates work is absolutely mind boggling.
You'd expect it to work like Paypal, where you have to sign in to your account to authorize the direct debit mandate and also have the option to revoke it there.
No, the way it works is that you have to print out a form, fill it out and send it to the payee who you are granting the direct debit mandate, e.g. your landlord. Your landlord then sends a copy of the direct debit mandate to your bank and the bank authorizes direct debit payments immediately without asking you.
If you want to revoke the direct debit mandate, you have to send a form to your landlord that you want to revoke the direct debit mandate.
This is mindbogglingly stupid, since the payee has no obligation to process your revocation immediately and can take their sweet time.
Canceling a direct debit mandate has no impact on your obligation to pay rent. It makes no sense that you have to inform the payee and let them gatekeep the revocation. It also makes it possible for unscrupulous people to request a direct debit mandate without your knowledge.
To be pedantic, IBAN isn't a payment system, but only an identifier. It's like an IP address - you still need to enlist the services of an ISP to reach it, and that ISP has to find an actual route and send packets over actual cables.
Wero is just another private company trying get their cut of payment fees. You can do the same thing with SEPA Instant Payment (or some member states outside of the Eurozone have their own similar thing).
I don't see why Wero should exists, their business model seems like "trying to get money for the same service you can get for free".
I couldn't have said it better. I don't understand what they solve.
We need instant, free SEPA transfers around the clock. Switzerland is not part of SEPA but IBAN is used so it is trivial to send payments to foreign accounts that have an IBAN.
I always say that the day Trump decides to block Visa/MasterCard outside the US is the day we get instant payments and finally get rid of cards.
Switzerland since last summer, but banks aren't forced to expose the feature to retail customers yet, at least not for free. We could have had that 15 years ago if our government wasn't so afraid of upsetting the banking lobbies.
In Germany we have free instant SEPA transfers. What Wero solves is that you can send money without giving your IBAN number, which at least in Germany can be used to take money from your account.
So you get standardized payment system where you scan a QR code or NFC tag with your bank app and the payment goes through IBAN and the system shows an approval of payment.
It's called SEPA direct debit. For some reason people don't want to use their web bank to pay for things, so what you usually do is you do a SEPA direct debit contract and the company takes the money from your account every month.
> We need instant, free SEPA transfers around the clock.
We have? SCT inst has been rolled out almost everywhere
> Switzerland is not part of SEPA
We definitely are. Transfers in EUR from/to CH IBANs use SEPA rails. CHF accounts can also send or receive EUR transparently (usually at a bad FX rate, but it just works).
> I don't understand what they solve. [...]
> I always say that the day Trump decides to block Visa/MasterCard outside the US is the day we get instant payments and finally get rid of cards.
You answered your own question. We need pan-European payments systems on top of the existing banking infrastructure. Payments and transfers aren't the same thing. By moving to mobile wallets with QR code and NFC payments, this opens up interoperability beyond Europe too.
> We have? SCT inst has been rolled out almost everywhere
That is true; I should have said "EEA" or "countries supporting IBAN".
> We definitely are. Transfers in EUR from/to CH IBANs use SEPA rails. CHF accounts can also send or receive EUR transparently (usually at a bad FX rate, but it just works).
Yes, which is exactly my point. We need it to work for CHF as well. Instant payments are not the norm and in fact UBS is charging for it.
> You answered your own question. We need pan-European payments systems on top of the existing banking infrastructure. Payments and transfers aren't the same thing. By moving to mobile wallets with QR code and NFC payments, this opens up interoperability beyond Europe too.
A payment should be a bank transfer. Anything more complicated is just something that is to be exploited by middle-men.
This is a false dichotomy. You can have very cheap transaction fees, Pix is state-run and probably operates at a loss, with merchant fees as low as 0.2~0.3%. In comparison the cheapest card payment under the EEA interchange cap is probably slightly above 0.5% when you add scheme fees and PSP costs.
However businesses do require payment systems and not just barebones bank transfers. Except for high trust, low volume transactions such as buying a car, paying your rent...
> A payment should be a bank transfer. Anything more complicated is just something that is to be exploited by middle-men.
I disagree with that. Payments (especially online and contactless ones) should have some form of buyer protection, chargeback and a way to handle fraudulent transaction, lost / stolen cards, etc.
wero is a european initiative set up by a consortium of banks that is built layered upon instant payments. it's not a private company like paypal or visa, its an attempt at making European payment infrastructure
Wero's Dutch predecessor, iDEAL, has been an established part of online payments for 20 years now.
As barely anyone has a credit card and very people want to deal with the faff of manually entering billing codes or account numbers, iDEAL usage is near universal for online payments. I don't recall fees ever going up as an end customer.
Card fees aren't paid by end customers either. The Swedish iDEAL equivalent, Swish, is more expensive than cards for smaller transactions (below 15 euros). Wero will be like Swish, not Pix.
Yep. The new thing is that you can pay your groceries with it in the supermarket early next year.
What I was reading, you're supposed to be able to send money to people with it this summer, pay in internet shops late this year and supermarkets and restaurants will follow in 2027.
Wero does several things. You can already send instant payments if you fill out IBAN and such, but entering order numbers, account references, and other such cruft for purchasing products is a pain. Companies receiving such payments also need to connect payment to a user and update their digital processes somehow. Wero offers such a solution so you don't have to find a PSD2 processor (which will probably cost just as much).
For interpersonal transactions I don't really see the advantage here, but for commercial use cases it's got a solid product and purpose.
Wero doesn't stand to benefit much from payment fees as European payment fees are already rather slim compared to, for instance, American ones (crazy things like percentages of purchase price with a minimum amount!).
So how can a QR code not supply the necessary data? Example:
payment://iban=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX&amount=12.34EUR
Any bank app should be able to read this. What is so complicated? Right, nothing. Credit card companies are a hidden tax, worse, they are a tax on turnover, not profits.
Brazilian here! For people from other countries, I can say with 100% certainty: There's not a single chance of Brazil's Pix going away — even if a far-right government wins and aligns with the USA. Even then, it's impossible. The ONLY way this could ever happen is if the USA invades Brazil.
Seems fairly logical for any large country to create something like this. Visa/MC is nice but allows the US to apply undue pressure to individuals. E.g. the US applied financial sanctions on ICC officials in the EU resulting in them losing access to Visa/MC credit cards and banks even those are that are purely EU based.
Not sure how it is overseas - but in the US, the #1 problem with Visa/MC is the huge percentage that they skim off every transaction. Businesses running on tight profit margins often give a discount if you pay with cash instead.
I think the fees are on order of 1-3% depending on your risk and business type. Certainly an issue but it's mitigated a bit by the decreased costs of going cashless. I.e. cashless operations avoids theft by employees; overhead for stocking, counting, and handling money; reduced insurance due to less chances of robbery; etc.
It's baffling to me how the US thinks they are entitled to anything related to this. Calling Visa and Mastercard global credit companies is a stretch, they're clearly American monopolies.
QR payments are ubiquitous in South East Asia. The eventual goal is ASEAN-wide interoperability, and some are even already interoperable with South Korean, Japanese and Chinese counterparts. And as expected, the US is also complaining about those, merely because Americans can't grasp the concept, like how they lag on pin adoption.
Most likely because your country's banks are heavily lobbying against such initiatives.
It's easy to blame Visa and Mastercard, but the reason why the EU doesn't have this is that the EPP (the largest political group in the European Parliament) answers to European banks, which don't want it.
I think the cryptocurrency-based implementation is stupid and a product of its time, but the EU is investing a lot of money into a system to push Visa and Mastercard out.
Many countries have their own payment systems already, often widely successful. Integration between these systems has been annoying but things have started to centralize on two or three systems across Europe now.
>Private banks are resistant to a digital euro both as a payment method and a store of value. The digital euro is designed to be a free, public payment method, directly challenging fee-based systems operated by banks. This is its key usefulness in terms of sovereignty. But it could also be used as a digital wallet and users may move their money out of private bank accounts to central bank-backed digital euro wallets meaning banks lose out.
So far they have successfully delayed any implementation.
The original release was a proof of concept. That proof of concept is currently being developed into a fully-fledged proposal. Once that proposal is accepted, and legislation is ready, the first actual implementations can begin.
I don't think you can call it a "delay", the project just moves at a glacial pace.
The entire project was never going to finish before 2030. Some banks are upset about it, for sure, but others are in favour.
I´m always baffled by the fact that PIX discussions (almost?) never address issues of privacy: the whole system is offered (and run) by the Brazilian central bank. Due to its popularity here, the central bank has enormous, detailed and live insight into a citizen´s financial life.
Even the dullest and most unimaginative civil servant / tax office employee / security or police member must have wet dreams imagining all the possibilities...
Meaning you need a court order to get access to personal transfer statements and the government already forced private institutions from reporting certain types of transactions to the central government.
It is not ideal, since this is not a constitutional right, just a law. But not that different from how it was before. However I believe the central bank can use anonamized data, which can be a good (analytics on where population spend money) or a bad (cracking down on certain types of business) thing.
Also it has come to a point that data going to private companies (like VISA/Mastercard) always ends up sold to private (and usually foreign) data-brokers to make profiles on you, at least the gov doesn't do that*. The main argument is that PIX is killing cash transactions, that is the _real_ loss here.
Like the political targeted ads backed by Russia during the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal, preventing foreign companies from analytics on your population is now a national security concern.
I have a credit card from BB, and I also use pix from time to time but not as much as a credit card. When Uncle Sam started bullying PIX I did what I never thought I would actually do. Since I can't stop using credit card (because it's helpful in my life) I canceled my Visa card with BB and requested ELO cc, created in 2011 by Bradesco, Banco do Brasil, and Caixa, not regretting anything. Blowing out someone else’s candle doesn’t make yours shine any brighter.
Visa and MC definitely use their consumer features (subsidized by merchants) to help maintain the duopoly, and a huge one is global acceptance. Does something like Pix require a strong, trustworthy central bank, and can it work outside of your home country? Or do even modern banking countries run into the LCD issue with international settlement?
I've been living abroad for over a decade now, so I never got to experience Pix.
I went back to Brazil a few years ago for a couple of weeks, and a kid on the streets asked me if I could buy some chewing gum and help him out. I wanted to, but I had no cash, so I told him I had no cash at all.
He said "It's fine, just send me some with Pix".
I still remember the incredulous look on his face when I told him I also didn't have Pix. He was certain I was lying. "_Everyone_ has it. How come you don't?"
PSD2 is merely a framework for an uniform access to banking, same APIs everywhere. While you can send money through it, it's still through the same means as normal.
Many of the european countries have their own "Pix", but there's no European-wide alternative. The ECB wants to make one (tentatively titled "digital euro"), but it's going to take a long time to come out.
The banks and the payment processors are the real customers of the payment networks and they all do better when they can squeeze more money from the end users - the cardholders and the businesses. Pix cuts out these middlemen and that’s an existential threat to their business model, ergo an “investigation” by the Trump admin.
The army of middlemen with their hands out is the worst part, where you also have fees paid to the merchant bank, the iso/payment service provider, and a chain of agents. In disfavored industries like adult content, this can reach 15% or more, plus thousands in annual "high risk" fees (even if chargeback rate is good). It's a huge anticompetitive racket, and the sooner US can shake off Visa/MasterCard, the better off we'll be.
All should be free. Imagine if government decided to impose 3% revenue tax, yet these companies get a free pass.
If these networks cannot run this for free, then they should be nationalised and tax payer should cover it. It will be cheaper (because it will become non-profit) for everyone and better.
Many banks already require monthly or annual payments for keeping an account with them. They also use the money from deposits to lend it at high interest rates. It is not like the banks are not extracting much more than a fair share of revenue from a captive market.
EU regulations limit those interchange fees to 0.2% for debit card transactions and 0.3% for credit card transactions so total costs are much lower for businesses. Cards have replaced cash even for small transactions in most European countries.
Add an extra fixed fee if you need 3D Secure (and equivalents). This should be covered already by the assessment and interchange fees to begin with.
Card networks' moat is their network effect. If you need to take a payment from someone around the world, cards are very convenient. Unless Pix and friends get to interop globally, cards will always have a place.
Exactly and if you think 2-3% is a small number you should keep in mind that that is effectively half of what the market returns over the long-term at 7%.
Many countries do, it's really more common than you might think. The problem is international payments and things like tourism. Want to order something from another country? Want to go there for a week and not have to use cash? In most cases it's either Visa or MasterCard.
It would be Un-American to overlook any chance to forcibly intervene in a Latin America country for the financial benefit of a large American company...wouldn't it?
The main issue in this market is that the consumer doesn’t pay the cost of the transaction, therefore there is no pressure to reduce costs, and hence no innovation. All of this could be solved if a government regulated that consumers must pay the fee. Here, in the UK, we have obviously regulated the exact opposite of a sensible regulation and were “shocked” when total fees paid on transactions exploded.
TIL that there are fees for Pix under certain circumstances (e.g. as a business receiving payments). I mostly use Pix for person-to-person transactions, and those are free (and instantaneous).
I don't even remember how we used to split bills back in the day anymore.
The only problem I actually face with Pix in Brazil is:
Some stores only accept Pix and don’t want Visa or cash. As a tourist, you end up unable to access a lot of things because, well, we don’t have Pix.
While I was in Brazil, some thugs with pistols came into a bar where I was. They forced people to send a Pix payment to a specific account, and their money was gone. In the credit card era, I guess the companies, insurance providers, and banks could reverse the transaction and cover the losses. With Pix, as I understand it, nobody feels responsible for it and the money is gone.
> While I was in Brazil, some thugs with pistols came into a bar where I was. They forced people to send a Pix payment to a specific account, and their money was gone.
Sorry, don't mean to be rude, but your story doesn't track for many reasons. First, PIX keys are associated to formal bank accounts. If what you described happend, that account was blocked by the bank likely within the hour after the 'robbery'. And "stealing" accounts from other people in a way that allows you to withdraw cash from is exceedingly difficult and uncommon.
Furthermore, it might have been possible in early days of pix, but it's been some time now (maybe from the start? Making your story impossible) that Pix has a 'undo' feature that the sender can do on their bank app or ATM even; similar to the 'block this credit transaction' from a credit card.
> With Pix, as I understand it, nobody feels responsible for it and the money is gone.
Incorrect, see above. Are you confusing PIX for some kind of crypto transfer?
Looking forward to a European-wide payment system. Sure, there are apps probably in each individual country that you can use to pay (via a QR code) or easily transfer money (usually using a phone number). But there are cases like renting a car or paying abroad which are not covered. Seems a bit crazy considering this is a common market. Why don't these apps look to expand more aggresively in the EU? I know there's Wero, but why aren't they more bald in their approach? I also know there's the digital euro promoted by the European Commission, but I'm not holding my breath for that. It takes way too long and my feeling is that it is being used mostly to pressure the US. I don't think we'll be able to use it anytime soon.
Yes, I agree. It's a bit weird because finally, after decades SEPA ICT is here and could be used to back this thing. It just needs to be more user-friendly.
Heh, Lula has a just slight lead on the elections this year.
If he cedes to the pressure, odds are he will so completely destroy his popularity that he won't even be able to be a candidate. He almost certainly knows that.
The pressure is irrelevant. Pix is not going away.
Philippines has QR/Instapay. Not sure if it's complete equivalent of PIX. But basically you can scan a QR code and you can pay using any bank or digital wallet.
When ever I visit Brazil now I feel very left out for not having Pix! I wanna join the electronic cash club. Don't think it's possible for foreigners tho
Ah, so they're leaving the money on the table. I suppose they're worried about money laundering.
Indonesia's electronic wallet have two tiers, unverified and verified. You don't even need a bank account (because most people don't), just a local number (which even tourist can buy easily at airport), with the limitation on unverified tier is that you can only top it up (by cash if you don't have local bank account) and spend it on merchant, no receiving nor sending money. There's also transaction limit but most of the population won't cross that in normal days.
The reason Pix needs a Brazilian bank account, is that at its core, it's just a bank transfer mechanism, like the older TED or DOC. Pix sends money from one bank account to another bank account. The main novelties are being instant, working 24h per day, and being able to use keys like a phone number or email as destinations (the Brazilian Central Bank has a central database which maps these keys to the bank account numbers).
I am Brazilian and I can tell PIX is the future of transactions. It's free (until now), fast and easy. All the world should adept it, plus with bitcoin at my opinion
How difficult is for USA administration learn good practices and initiatives and think into implementing those? And also, why Master and Visa haven’t came with a solution where they integrate with all of that and innovate?
This idea that all they do should be de facto standard for the whole world is so démodé.
My understanding is that FedNow could become something like Pix, but implementation is voluntary. In Brazil, the central bank required all retail banks of significance to implement Pix by a certain deadline.
Visa and Mastercard are very much against FedNow becoming widely used, as it would destroy their business.
>And also, why Master and Visa haven’t came with a solution where they integrate with all of that and innovate?
There are a lot of people who integrate with them. The issue is that anyone who does so must comply with the PCIDSS. Most hobbyists cant stretch that far and use intermediaries.
>This idea that all they do should be de facto standard for the whole world is so démodé.
I dont know what Brazil's issues were, but Visa and Mastercard show up, they integrate with terminal providers directly and indirectly, and they bring a battle tested data security standard with them. Compared to other industries they are basically self regulating, and in some countries they adopt the PCI DSS into law.
Pix is for domestic use right? So tourists who come to Brazil still use Visa and Mastercard as well as Brazilian tourists who travel abroad. Visa and Mastercard are companies of the past, crypto and stablecoins will destroy them sooner or later.
It's just buzzwordy bullshit. The European system is just a classic credit/debit system. The Chinese system is a bit more sophisticated, with offline capability and smart contracts.
But it doesn't use any distributed proof-of-work/stake stuff.
Cross border payment with QR codes are already a thing in plenty of Southeast and East Asian countries. Crypto and stablecoins aren't needed (nor wanted, due to money laundering risks).
I can see that Visa and Mastercard are freaking out, not because Pix can take over their business model, but because it can give ideas to other countries doing the same.
I've spent three months earlier this year in Brazil and never used Pix once. Not because I didn't want, but because I couldn't, or let's be honest: my time was not worth the hassle. To be able to pay with Pix, one needs to get a CPF (Brazilian Tax ID). Then to open a bank account, mostly local banks only accept Pix, with which you can tie your CPF. It's possible but it's definitely not straightforward the slightest. All the while Visa and Mastercard work everywhere in the country, I almost never had to pay in cash, even some sellers in the streets accepted regular credit cards.
Pix is certainly great, but locally only, and if every country comes with its own system and Visa or Mastercard disappear, we are going to go back to how people used to travel 50 years ago: with a lot of USD bank notes hidden in your hotel room or elsewhere ...
Pix is a good local idea, but the world needs something better.
> but because it can give ideas to other countries doing the same
This is happening right now in Europe. You have systems like Blik, Twint, Swish etc.
I know that at least Blik is working on making it possible for international payments.
> I know that at least Blik is working on making it possible for international payments
International transfers between MB Way (PT) and Bizum (ES) are working e.g. via phone number. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Alliance
What's needed in Europe is federation of the existing systems, not one winner taking it all.
That's exactly what's happening, see the EU digital euro scheme. It's planned to be free of fees too, modeled around how SEPA was done for wires.
There has been massive resistance by the incumbents of course, including banks (since they too charge a fee on top of visa).
It's been in the backlog for years but the US sanction against ICC judges leading to them being cut off from most things including payment triggered a renewal of it.
That's what I am afraid of. The resistance from the incumbents plus the external pressure from the US (and China?) might be to strong. Better go with a federated approach, mandating all the different payment apps available all over the EU to allow connections from other participants.
In any case, the digital euro seems to take years (earlier expected date is 2029). I don't understand why it takes so long.
It seems right now the European thinking is that the US might just do it regardless so may as well prepare.
From what I remember the bank started to federate around a payment network to outcompete the digital euro. I hope the digital euro wins, I hope they don't fumble it.
The European Payments Initiative (Wero) made the mistake of only aiming for Peer-to-Peer QR code payments, carefully avoiding competing with cards so each country could keep their card schemes (Cartes Bancaires, Girocard etc). I don't think it will ever even _compete_ with cards in the near future.
EPA [0] and EPI [1] are doing that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Initiative
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Alliance
Twint is in Switzerland for more than 10 years, hardly a new idea
Twint is great, I wish more Swiss based people would use it. In the expat community most are using Visa/MC through Apple Pay. I have no idea why.
Swish is even older.
The issues with Twint:
- Switzerland hasn't gotten Apple to open up NFC payments at the same conditions as the EEE, at least not yet.
- Twint is part of the EMPSA which hasn't really delivered anything tangible. On the contrary there's now a real push from EPI and EuroPA to make Wero interoperable with non-Eurozone networks. Hopefully Twint will get on board too.
- Transaction fees are on the higher side, consequently merchants don't have any reason to push Twint or disincentive debit card payments.
> Twint is part of the EMPSA which hasn't really delivered anything tangible.
It's easy to see why. Both Swish and Vipps is part of EMPSA. In Sweden, everyone uses Swish. Vipps (from Norway I believe) wants to expand to Sweden but no one is using it since it's not compatible with Swish. So making it compatible would potentially hurt the business of Swish.
Regulation is needed. Otherwise it will never happen.
If EPI / Wero reach a critical mass then hopefully this will change, as non-Eurozone countries will have a direct interest in making the local mobile payment solution accept the one used by an area of 350+ million people.
Then the EPI protocol could become the least common denominator and you might be able to use Vipps, Twint, Blik... in Sweden? I believe similar scenarios are happening in Asia around Alipay and UPI, for instance I think I can use the Korean Kakao Pay on a payment terminal in Japan, because both sides are compatible with Alipay+.
since the end of last year we have had instant payment in the EU. no more need for Mastercard/VISA. what I see missing is education.
That's why I'm telling each merchant I come bye to use it. super simple.
There is India's UPI (launched in 2016), Singapore PayNow (Launched 2017) that works in a similar way. And they also work across each platform.. UPI users in India can transfer to Paynow users in Singapore and vice versa.
[1] https://www.dbs.com.sg/personal/deposits/pay-with-ease/payno...
some UPI users to some Paynow users. (limited to participating institutions only).
Thailand Promptpay is federated too, as are some Japanese services.
> To be able to pay with Pix, one needs to get a CPF (Brazilian Tax ID).
There are third party apps you can use to pay with pix using a credit card, can't recall that name, but read about it here a few months back, on another pix-thread.
> CPF (Brazilian Tax ID). Then to open a bank account
Getting a CPF is absolutely trivial, but I'm not sure you can open a bank account without RN/RNE, at least not with local banks. Can probably manage with one of the online banks.
I think you need a RN/RNM to open a bank account even with online banks - I haven’t tried all of them of course so there might be some that work with cpf only
For comparison, one does not need need to get US tax ID number to use a Visa card.
Calling a CPF a "tax ID" is a bit misleading, much like calling an SSN "the way you get social security benefits". You can (even as a non-citizen) get one in a couple mins at the post office, and it's used for literally everything, including things like buying a SIM card or registering for some public WiFi hotspots.
Okay, that's quite a bit less bureaucratic than American EIN, ITIN, or SSN (collectively known as TINs).
How many digits/letters long is it? One problem with American TINs is the entire space is only a billion digits, so it's not possible to assign one to every person in the world. If we could add two more digits or make 3 alphanumeric, it would be a lot more feasible to do this, but that is basically impossible at this point.
"we are going to go back to how people used to travel 50 years ago: with a lot of USD bank notes hidden in your hotel room or elsewhere ..."
Who did that?
Most people except for criminals and refugees used traveller's cheques:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveller%27s_cheque
I think some banks, like AmEx, still issue them.
People did that? I took one look at the fees and ... "no thank you", and took cash.
Yeah, if I wanted to pay the crazy spread on currency exchange, I’d use my credit card instead.
10 years ago I was still traveling with a bunch of $100 banknotes and reading blogs to find the most honest shady currency exchange place with good rates wherever I went. Fun times!
I even paid for two! iPhones in cash back then!
Today? I just stop by an ATM and withdraw some cash, everything else goes contactless on Wise.
We always got traveler’s checks from AAA which were “free”.
I assume the quotes because maybe no transaction fee but massive spread on the exchange!
Well it was dollars for dollars so they really were free (except for the AAA membership).
International money exchange has always been fun, luckily for us we never really travelled anywhere that you couldn't just use dollars.
Sure. It might have been different in other places but when my folks took out traveller's cheques in the nineties to travel to e.g. the caribbean the 'cost' in the form of a slightly worse currency price wasn't a serious issue, in part because ATM fees/exchange rates were way steeper than piecemeal exchanging the cheques for local cash. Getting a bank to reissue cheques was easier than replacing a card too.
Some destinations were probably cash friendly, i.e. no one would scope you out for theft, but that's not the kind of travel I had in mind. I'm actually not that familiar with that kind of travel, I've mostly travelled on a budget or to less touristy places.
on Europe there is talks about using Spanish's Bizum as the oficial European replacement for Visa/MasterCard
It's not a replacement until they issue cards that work without a phone.
Frankly, the number of people that care about no-phone functionality is tiny. I bet the greatest preference is the other way: the ability to use it without a physical card. Everyone has a phone.
Of course you need a backup at some point, but it’s just that: a backup.
The stated objective of this initiative is to break free of the American Mastercard/Visa duopoly. It would be pretty fucking stupid that if replacement required the use of the American Apple/Google duopoly!
Convenience of use with your phone is one thing. Requiring a (locked-down, attestated) phone to create an account is another thing entirely.
no doubt that is a top FEATURE request, but why do all this work to transfer the system from a US finance oligopoly to a US tech oligopoly?
Android and IOS are controlled by US companies. And both google and apple can ban you for no reason.
Touché! Freeing oneself from America is nearly impossible. Unless you’re China, probably.
Wero already has more presence in Europe though
You don't need a brazilian tax ID to use PIX, I've used it from MercadoPago from another country and there are a lot of options to use it besides MP.
Well .. How did you register to MercadoPago? I never was able when I was in Argentina (end of last year). It also asked me for some official IDs in Argentina which is even harder to get than a CPF (or probably impossible as a non-resident, I didn't bother at that point)
With MP you need an official ID, but there are some crypto apps that have pix and allow to register with a passport.
> To be able to pay with Pix, one needs to get a CPF (Brazilian Tax ID).
It's not ideal, but you can use Wise to pay using Pix and India's UPI. You simply transfer the money from your local bank account to Wise and they transfer to whatever Pix you tell. It's almost instant.
Meanwhile, there are talks about integrating these systems. This is the obvious long-term game, a clear threat to Visa and MasterCard.
Right now in Brazil the only advantages of using a regular credit card are the cashbacks and convenience to use contactless. The convenience is going away -- Pix now supports contactless payment, but it's not widely accepted yet.
Wise remains one of the worst professional support experiences I've ever had at my company and would highly advise people not to use them.
What is a better alternative in your experience?
In contrast, I had great support the one time I contacted them. Have used them in business and personally across a number of different accounts with no problems.
The problem with these fintech companies, is that they work great right up until you randomly get banned.
They then they decide to keep your money for months. At that point, have fun getting it back unless you send a letter from your lawyers.
Another advantage is anti-fraud measures and remedy (chargebacks). This (BTW clearly AI-generated) article mentions some fraud thing they're working on (Special Refund Mechanism), so we'll see how long it takes for that to take effect.
For now, I'll be using our Canadian not-quite-Pix called Interac to pay small amounts of money to people I trust, but I won't any time soon be buying a fridge with it, or booking a week-long cottage stay on a website I've never used before.
Canadian here who's not familiar with Pix; is Interac a pretty close comparable? If so, it's not the end-all answer for exchanging money for goods & services, but great in a small subset of transactions.
It's not run by a central bank and not mandated, but it "organically" became standard for banks and many vendors to support it. I hope they find a good way to combat fraud and the fee differential will make it more frequent for vendors to offer a discount for cash/Interac (or an extra charge for credit cards). It used to be common, then got banned, and is now allowed but uncommon. I for one don't really want to use an American credit card, but the fact that I get 1.5% cash back and fraud protection is a fairly strong incentive.
> It's not ideal, but you can use Wise to pay using Pix
If your Wise account is Brazilian. If you have a foreign account, base currency or whatever the name is for that concept, you cannot.
tbh even cashback these days might be worthless. It need to be a considerable amount. Because most things you buy, you have a discount when buying with Pix or money...
What still make credit cards strong in Brazil it's installments though...
Europe is already moving towards having own payment system with Wero
Wero is a private effort, the digital euro is closer to Pix but it keeps being stalled (given the article in question, one could make some guesses as to why).
Most European countries I frequent already have their own local equivalent to Pix. In Spain almost everyone has Bizum, and not uncommon for vendors at markets to accept it too, Sweden has Swish which is the same deal for the Swedes. I think this lists the most prominent ones that are in wide usage today already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Mobile_Payment_System...
Apparently, some of these already have interoperability between each other too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Alliance), happy to learn I can now send/receive money to/from my Portuguese brethren :)
Since May the 5th most shops will begin integrating Bizum within their payments systems.
In Spanish:
https://cincodias.elpais.com/companias/2026-04-01/a-partir-d...
Since the Bizum became widespread, depending on the size of the business, some always did accept Bizum if you ask nicely :)
Would be amazing for me to use Swish to pay for things in Brazil as if I had Pix! Could that work somehow?
I was shocked that none of my cards worked for lots of stuff in the Netherlands. They also have their own system.
> Pix is a good local idea, but the world needs something better.
There is no problem to continue using maybe Visa/Mastercard when dealing abroad or external, but when you are a normal citizen, it's far better to use Pix in this case, you are supporting a national company, paying fee's to them and not at the whims of an external countries policies.
Edit: They also tend to be non profits ironically enough.
In Ireland many years ago there was a system called "Laser" which was very similar, the only reason it was changes was for 'convenience' but in reality it was because Visa and MC had taken over all the POS market, and so Laser cards couldn't give cash back. So the banks just folded.
I can't wait to see Europe being some competition to the duopoly that is Mastercard and Visa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_(debit_card)
We might be getting something soon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_euro
Europe spends way too much time and money on various Fintech pet projects. There's the Digital Euro and then there's Wero and Target and a bunch of other shit that doesn't reach consumer scale usage or attention.
Anything else?
> in reality it was because Visa and MC had taken over all the POS market
Do you happen to have any insight on this? I mean, how is it that one or two companies can manage to squeeze everyone else out so completely? If two big players control Point of Sales (POS), shouldn't someone be able to come in and make a business out of underselling the competition? I would think that smaller overhead means smaller margins are needed.
I've talked to small businesses about fees and charges for their POS and they are always thrilled when people pay with cash, because it means they get the full amount. (These conversations have come up because I've run small businesses in the past, and I remember how horrible it felt to "sell" something for $30, only to get like...$5 out of it between fees, taxes, and insurance costs. It seems like every business I've spoken to hates Visa and MasterCard with a passion, so I would think that small business would be thrilled to have a new player.
At a guess, I would think that part of(?) the reason may be due to (and rightfully so) whatever regulations are in place to force money transfer companies into meeting certain security ratings or whatever. Even so, surely there are people that are willing to fight for a piece of the action, right? It seems crazy to me that no one else sees that as an opportunity to do it better. I'd really like it if fees for small-to-medium businesses could be dropped entirely, and it was only the major players that offset the costs for everyone else.
Europe already has plenty of alternative card systems e.g. France's Cartes Bancaires (CB) and ironically Germany just last year turned it's Girocard/Maestro system off in favour of Visa/Mastercard; the problem is the banks in individual countries in Europe are not willing to give up their control in favour of a compatible standard.
> I can see that Visa and Mastercard are freaking out, not because Pix can take over their business model, but because it can give ideas to other countries doing the same.
Oh they absolutely will. And the US government will come to their aid.
Consider the case of Bombardier [1], a Canadian airplane manufacturer. Boeing was caught with its pants down by Airbus with the A320/321 and panicked into making the 737MAX. Boeing has a captive audience with US airlines and the 737. A shared type rating is a massive advantage for Boeing but the economics of the Airbus narrow bodies were just too good.
Then along comes this Canadian companiy who saw an opportunity to create a narrow body commercial jet in this range (100-150 seats) and some US airlines were interested. To avoid this Boeing offered United a deep discount to not buy the CSeries and Bombardier responded with discounts of their own.
What happened? Boeing then went to the government and accused Bombardier of "dumping" as well as having goavernment subsidies. This is particularly funny if you know anything about the billions in subsidies Boeing gets from both Washington state and the federal government. The US governments made complaitns to the WTO and ended up imposing a 300% tariff on Bombardier, effectively killing that business. It eventually became the Airbus A220.
Free markets, by the way.
The US will punish foreign companies for competing on price by abusing process and treaties, ignoring it whne it's inconvenient, use tariffs with flimsy excuses, punish unrelated industries to apply pressure and otherwise bully other countries for daring to compoete.
Being American companies is unacceptable. So is doing anything that serve as a model to any other country that might threaten an American monopoly or oligopoly.
So prepare for accusations of government subsidies and the US applying pressure in unrelated areas because of this.
As an aside, the US does this with governments too. "Oh, you wanted to profit from your own natural resources and use that money for the benefit of the people? I think not. Look at this system of government that isn't working. Nevermind that we're starving it with brutal economic sanctions. It doesn't work. Look away. Nothing to see here."
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSeries_dumping_petition_by_Bo...
Lovely how China is now beating the Americans in their own game. And the reaction is predictable: accuse the Chinese of being a threat to National Security and stop them from taking over the American market after they have already taken most of the rest of the world. Eventually, Americans will be the ones paying the price for the overly protectionist policies of their government.
Other countries adopting it is already happening. I live in Bolivia, and a few events made QR payment systems widely used across the country. I have family in Peru, and it is a similar case with Yape, another QR payment system. In Bolivia, fintech companies also offer integration with Pix in Brazil without the need for a CPF to send and receive payments. Since we are neighbors, this is very handy.
They can federate the systems, I know Singapore’s PayNow connects to Malaysia and Thailands systems
China's UnionPay and AliPay are to various extents are integrated with the systems in Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia [1]. Each country has its own system, but integrates with others.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/china-indonesia-have...
UnionPay and AliPay are more akin to Visa and Mastercard than Pix.
> Pix is certainly great, but locally only,
Pix is no local as a user, you can use it without a CPF: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48053527>.
Does Pix have an equivalent of a prepay debit card? That seems like the most logical easy setup.
If you must have integration with identity, just tie it to whatever visa or proof of arrival. Last I went to Mexico they were issuing QR codes for inbound travelers.
I wonder if I showed up (as a foreign visiting) in the US how long it would take and what kind of documents would it take to have a Visa/Mastercard. I guess it would be the same as having or even longer to have your CPF issued and a digital account here in Brazil.
Pix isn't intended (yet) for foreigners to use. It's mostly for local Brazilians, and here it's brilliant: free for personal use, really fast (frequently instantaneous, has a 10 second limit), and accessible (every major bank and most of the smaller ones supports it).
I can understand why Visa and Mastercard are worried. Apple is as well, since it refuses to support Pix in Apple Pay, which is mandatory in Brazil. But honestly? Fuck these companies. (Sorry about my French, I couldn't think of another way to put it.)
Have they said "we refuse" or could it be that they have other priorities that come first?
They were facing fines [1] for blocking usage of NFC a year ago and are still [2] fighting integration, so pretty explicit refusal.
[1] https://www.macobserver.com/news/brazils-antitrust-authority...
[2] https://9to5mac.com/2026/02/19/apple-accuses-brazilian-banks...
Lots of countries around Brazil are taking pix. Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay.
And you can totally expand the idea. The fact that you need national id for pix doesn’t mean the idea “doesn’t scale.” It means the current implementation of it is not focused on use by visitors.
I really don’t understand what you’re getting at, it seems like a pretty narrow view of the possibilities.
Meanwhile US citizens are using paper (cash and cheques) for lots of transactions. Or one of the big credit card corporations.
I actually see it as quite worrysome. This would crowd out competition, but then gives full monopoly of payments to the local government.
If you are say a political outcast, there's a single point of failure in getting debanked. Not good.
I do like processing fees down, but definitely not at the cost of creating a single point of failure with power over the entire population.
Visa and Mastercard already are a single point of failure (see e.g. the French judge that cannot use it anymore because the US government did not like it when he did his job). This way, there'll be at least two points of failure.
VISA an MasterCard have Credit Cards. Pix is just a way to transfer money you have in your bank account. In europe we can do that with IBAN. It goes from one account to another. In Argentina we have something similar in all banks. What is unike from VISA and MasteCard, at least untill now, is the Credit part of it.
Lots of other Asian countries already did something similar, e.g. Singapore had PayNow QR Codes (probably the closest to Pix) since 2017, Thai PromptPay was even earlier and India UPI (slightly different wallet system) since 2016. China was even earlier but different though private superapps.
What has changed, and I find interesting, is that Card rails are more and more used for political pressure [1], and I feel the "American hemisphere" is probably the reason Pix gets more of this pressure than Asian countries.
1) https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/icc-strongly-rejects-new-us-san...
There is nothing preventing PIX from going global (just like VISA/MC). If you look at the history of domestic systems e.g. China Unipay, India UPI/Rupay, Japan JCB they started off as local systems and went global.
Japan JCB is Internationally accepted. China Unipay is also considerably "international" i.e. internationally accepted and India's UPI/Rupay card is adding new countries at a fast clip. The reason most people "don't know" whether they can pay with China Unipay or India's Rupay is because they are not advertised with the same logos as VISA/MC on acceptance sites.
However both China Unipay and India's Rupay through their partnership with Discover Card (now owned by CapitalOne ) are accepted anywhere Discover card is accepted
The place where these "domestic" systems haven't quite measured up to VISA/MC is the issuing side i.e. the entities controlling these systems currently do not allow foreign banks to issue cards with their logos or use their network to settle the transactions. If you're in the US, you may not get a Unipay or Rupay card from a local bank. There are multiple reasons for that, some strategic some political.
It will be interesting to see how they evolve over time. In spite of the exponential rise of PIX , UPI and Unipay, VISA and MC themselves have been doing remarkably well in the past 10-20 years. Unlikely either of them will go belly up.
People underestimate how difficult it was to transfer money before Pix, even between local banks. The process was hard to use, it could take days and the fees were huge, depending on your bank. Pix solved all these problems.
What happens also is that many sellers provide discounts when using Pix, because you dodge the expensive fees charged not only by Visa and MasterCard, but the fees operators (banks, fintechs) charge to provide the infrastructure (PoS machines, financing for installments, etc, the last one being quite common in the country) to use these networks.
I think we need to put this in context for folks who are not from Brazil.
Comparatively, a domestic bank wire in Brazil before Pix was already easier and faster than one in the US today. I don't recall the bank fees being bad either.
The issue is that bank wires were never designed for buying lunch at the food court. They're not instant and not user friendly to set up.
Pix is alien technology next to the stuff we have in the US.
It sounds a bit like the Dutch Tikkie with the QR codes and instant transfer. Of course, in the EU most bank wires are already free when using SEPA, and often nearly instant as well. This Tikkie thing is a way to easily create a payment request for people who can't be arsed to simply carry cash (and raise the country's resilience to system failure in the process).
Brazilian living in NL, experienced in both. I think biggest difference is Tikkie doesn't give you an easy identifier. Great for privacy, but being able to send money to your email/phone number makes a difference for some real time use cases. QR code helps, but it is not the same.
IBAN works pretty ok as an identifier when you need that. Bank transfers between Dutch banks are almost instant anyway
It is instant provided your financial institution works within the SEPA Instant transfer system
Since last year, all EU banks have to support SEPA Instant Transfer, both receiving & sending, at the same price as a usual transfer (Instant Payments Regulation 2024/886)
If only https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPC_QR_code supported a sepa instant bit so that one could just show a qr code, scan it with whatever payer banking app and authorize the sepa instant payment.
This is what Ideal/Wero does. Because this is the standard for webshops in the Netherlands (and rapidly expanding to the whole EU) the only gap left to fill was that of consumer-to-consumer transfers with just a QR code to scan. Tikkie I mentioned above solves that well enough in the Netherlands, although that bank-run app is horribly laden with stupid ads and deals you can't seem to turn off.
> free when using SEPA, and often nearly instant as well
It shocks me how well it works sometimes. Literally press pay and move eyeballs to notifications and it's there already.
Would you say that Pix is comparable to Canada's Interac Debit?
Speaking as a non-expert, I think Pix has much bigger scope. Pix is account-to-account. One can buy real estate, pay bills, make person-to-person and business-to-business transactions, government payments, recurring payments. The funds also settle instantly.
Most people don't experience the full scope of Pix which is impressive.
The credit card companies really missed the boat here to become the standard for consumer to consumer payments. Of course, from their perspective, they know that people would not accept having to pay for this service so the companies won’t go near it.
Sounds like pix is very similar to the Swedish swish. Phone numbers are used for identity, payments are instant, businesses often have qr codes with their identity etc..
It's like WhatsApp but with money!
The Swish system is private, which means that the fees are as high as the market can bear. In many cases cards are cheaper.
If the e-krona happens, that would be a better comparison.
As is the dominant e-ID platform, because our politicians are fond of bank cartels.
It kind of works and Swish does too, unless they're down which happens every now and then, but there is room for improvement that would be easier realised as a public sector endeavour.
Free for individuals, and costs 3 euro per month for companies +0.1 euro per transaction (only for companies)
What cards are you taking about that are cheaper than that?
eInterac is also account to account, but single transaction limits are far too low to transact down payments or even many b2b payments.
People still increasingly pay their rent here via eInterac.
e.g you can subscribe monthly to ChatGPT or Amazon Prime using Pix. It's called "Automatic Pix".
The entire problem solved by Pix is an artificially created obstacle put in place so banks can charge for something they do for free.
The article doesn't mention China's digital renminbi, but it is similar, including the aspect of being offered by the country's central bank.
Rather than this looking like "Alien tech" in the US, it's just another example of things in the US looking more like stone age tech to the rest of the world.
Like banned chinese EVs, and a pushback on solar electricity generation, all of these are manifestations of the US government primarily making it easier for multi-billion $$ multi-national corpses to filch the general population.
This isn't just the orange cheato, it's been the policy of every modern US administration, with the backing of the majority of the legislature.
And for some reason, the plurality of voters seem to be in favor.
“Money transfer” is, at the end, a database transaction. It’s a solved problem - no aspect of what is needed is unsolved.
It’s just that there are billion dollar entrenched companies that do not want sending money to be as easy as a click.
Pix is ok - but it’s clunky to use and has a single point of failure.
On the former - paying is:
Which is considerably more involved than a contactless payment.
On the single point of failure side of things - I was at an event in Brasilia a month or so back, pix grinds to a crawl, taking 10+ minutes per transaction, and the drinks queues rapidly got out of hand. As nobody accepts cash any more, and because nobody has a card any more, this meant they sold practically no drinks.
So it ain’t bad but tbh passing bits of paper back and forth is still easier.
Doesn't seem too different from QRIS in Indonesia, authentication is relatively painless since some apps offer either pin or fingerprint. Being open standard (multiple banks, electronic wallet and payment gateways support it, multiple payment apps support it, all interoperable) probably help since there's never any delay I've experienced for years, and this system is handling from small payment on roadside hawkers to electronic purchase in large stores both offline and online.
More fancy payment flow are also available, such as vendors generating one-time QR code that already include the payment amount, and the user apps generating one-time QR code that the vendor scan, thus switching some of user steps to the vendor.
In most cities I've lived and visited, using QR is far more convenient than paper. Good luck using contactless when most phones don't support it, and even when Visa & MasterCard pushed their contactless standard, I never encounter a single vendor with a working machine (this range from small shops to large hypermarket). Maybe because they have bigger MDR than QR, but from customers PoV contactless simply don't work, until QRIS also adopt NFC and suddenly it's workable (but not widespread yet since most phones still don't)
There's Pix contactless payment. Both Samsung and Google wallet support. Samsung added a few weeks ago. Google added 1 or 2 years ago.
You can actually pay QR Code Pix now with Samsung by just opening the camera too.
Apple refuses to implement Pix on Apple Pay, and regulatory agencies are trying to change that...
Pix integration with Google Pay it's just amazing.
Imagine the situation in the US as if every app or website magically used Google Pay.
Well, that's Brazil now if you use Android. Because as soon as you copy a Pix code, it will prompt Google Pay :) And every service in Brazil have Pix... Even international ones as Stripe supports...
USD is a hard currency unlike the BRL. It is not supposed to move that fast by design. Google “Regulation E”. Brazil has no such strong provisions for protecting unauthorized transfers out of your account
> USD is a hard currency unlike the BRL
How much does this matter in the context of paying in BRL, to a BRL merchant, in Brazil?
>strong provisions for protecting unauthorized transfers out of your account
What's with people complaining that they can't terminate transfers out of their accounts?
Your comment is absolute nonsense.
I worked in a bank in Brazil in the early 2000s. Bank transfers were always easy and relatively quick. At worst, transfers would happen overnight during a national event called bank compensation where all banks would sync up with the Central Bank.
Pix solved a bunch of problems and made all of the above quicker and easier, but Brazil has been at the forefront of banking systems for a long time.
We had TED, but it was not instant, nor was it free. It only worked on working hours and took a maximum of 1h, still better than American banks, though. QR Codes is also a big deal.
The deployment of PIX was also really well executed, if it took too much I'm 100% sure that Visa and Master would've made it worse. Being quick was a wise decision
> We had TED, but it was not instant, nor was it free.
Not instant, but pretty close for the time. It might not have been free but most basic bank packages had a bunch of TED transfers included. For everything else, there was still DOC which would happen overnight and was either free or cheaper than TED.
I'm not dissing Pix in any way. Pix is probably the most advanced transfers and payments system in the world, and I'm 100% with you on how well it was (and still is) executed.
I was mostly responding to:
> how difficult it was to transfer money before Pix, even between local banks.
It was certainly not.
I remember being in the UK a couple years after I was on that bank, and being shocked at how primitive everything related to banking was. Transfers would take days or even weeks and would be incredibly awkward to make. Cheques were the quickest way to transfer money between people - other than cash, obviously, but that was not always desired.
A few years later I visited the US and it was even more retrograde than what I had seen in the UK all those years before.
TED is still very much alive.
In fact, the BRL amount settled via TED is still higher than Pix, although the gap seems to be closing
Several backs had a good amount of TED limit. Although everything changed when Nubank launched, giving unlimited TEDs to everyone. Most banks followed at the time, so basically around 2015~ several big banks had unlimited TEDs.
The problem with TED it's just how hard it was to send money. You had to insert, if I recall right:
- Person full name - Social security number - Select the Bank Name - The type of account (savings or checking account) - Agency and account number
This basically means that TED was used as a serious payment thing, like money you receive from your company, etc.
A lot of companies still use TED.
Man, It is perder of magnitude different. I've noticed it when I gave small money for a beggar using pix. It's really revolutionary.
And remember that credit card fees are greater in Brazil
I won't dispute you or even cassianoleal, but compared to how was US in 2005 (just barely finishing check/que digitalization), Brazil is indeed faster in this forefront (and it enabled the creation of Pix in the first place).
Speaking of the forefront the UK has had interbank realtime payments (Faster Payment) since 2008. It also used to have something like Pix, i.e. bank account referenced by user's phone number called Paym from 2014, until it was discontinued due to lack of demand in 2023. Faster Payments is still operational.
Exactly, I worked in the SPB (https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistema_de_Pagamentos_Brasilei...) and was/is pretty well structured and well implemented.
Is this similar to India's UPI? Visa and MasterCard exist (and grumble from time to time) but aren't needed.
Yep.
> People underestimate how difficult it was to transfer money before Pix, even between local banks.
The difficulties were the same as everywhere. I worked in Bank in Brazil and in Germany. A lot of the difficulties we still face in Germany today.
What difficulties do you mean? We got Sepa instant transfers nowadays...
> People underestimate how difficult it was to transfer money before Pix, even between local banks. The process was hard to use, it could take days and the fees were huge, depending on your bank. Pix solved all these problems.
Nearing 17:00 in a bank: Does anyone here need to do a TED or a DOC? Come to attendant now before the system shuts down for the day!
When I tell that I used to withdraw cash at the ATM in one bank, cross the street, deposit the CASH in another bank ATM people think I am crazy. But I was doing monthly that circa 2014, all to avoid paying ~3 USD transfer fee (what was called a DOC/TED).
In Brazil your employer kinda chooses which bank they use and you kinda have to open a bank account with them to get paid, but it is hardly worth it to move your credit card to another bank. This is why my salary came in one bank and my credit card bills came in another.
Sorry that you wasted time but - it was wasted time!
"Salary portability" is ensured in Brazil by the Banco Centra, at least since 2006. Employees can receive salary in any bank account they choose, even if their employer processes payroll through a different bank.
The original bank must automatically transfer the funds to the employee’s choice of account without charging a transfer fee: https://www.bcb.gov.br/meubc/faqs/p/existe-algum-custo-para-...
Read: The USA does not like what they cannot control!!
I am glad to see the EU following Brazil with its own payment system.
Visa/MasterCard/Paypal era is gone!!
Yup
Americans will be "pro free market" until it's somebody else doing the competition, then they will be very butthurt about it (at best)
Considering the times we're living in, each country should consider implementing own payment system, and never abandoning cash for digital currency. Both systems should coexist and complement each other but we aren't living in a perfect world.
Absolutely. The US has shown it is happy to threaten allies and weaponise everything it can in international relations. It would be madness to leave critical payments infrastructure dependent on the US.
The US has a long tradition of arm-twisting to forward its business interests.
This habit is starting to do more harm than good (to them) and they should try to focus on innovating the way China does.
I think you mean this habit has benefit no one outside of a small elite moneyed interests that want to protect their fief.
US foreign policy does not benefit Americans, it benefits the elites.
Absolutely. Look at the Portuguese Empire: even at the end most Portuguese were poor and many had to emigrate.
Most British had a low standard of living going into the XX century. Engels' report to Parliament painted a bleak picture of the standard of living in Britain at the peak of the British Empire.
> Since 2022, Mastercard Brazil’s CEO, Marcelo Tangioni, has voiced his concerns: “Pix is great, beneficial for the industry. What’s not great is that it falls under the Central Bank. It can’t regulate and compete at the same time”.
Why not? This is such an American point of view that sounds similar to why the IRS doesn't offer easier tax filing options.
This is a free market. All he has to do is offer a better service than the public offering.
I always hear that the government is inefficient, should be easy no?
Whenever people start arguing about inefficient government they should be reminded that pix costs like 10M USD a year to run. An absolute bargain for what it delivers.
It can't really, but public services don't necessarily need competition. In fact it can even make sense to run them at a loss.
And alternate payment methods are allowed, so if there was space for a private entity to offer a better/cheaper service they could. But it is hard to compete with a fully integrated (mostly) free service.
It is delightful to see PIX's exponential growth. It was preceded by India's UPI and borrowed heavily from it Here's a paper describing the experience: https://www.braziliankeynesianreview.org/BKR/article/view/33...
It is worth noting that despite all this cheap sovereignty talk from Brazil’s president, in practice Brazil would not be able to operate Pix at that scale without heavily relying on American hyperscalers companies.
Brazilian institutions are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to US cloud providers, specially AWS, to be able to process that many transactions.
Earlier this year, when sa-east-1 was down, major banks were forced to suspend Pix payments for nearly 3 hours. When this happens, some people are literally not able to buy anything because that’s their only payment method. So much for “President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva proclaiming a nationwide campaign: “Pix is ours, my friend”.”
Don’t get me wrong, Pix has been a great success and a major achievement, but all this adversarial political talk between the US and Brazil administrations is really cringe, both countries are better doing business together.
[1]https://economia.uol.com.br/noticias/redacao/2026/02/07/falh...
Only reinforces the point that relying on american infrastructure as a critical piece of your stack, in 2026, is a liability.
This is not a real problem outside of niche industries
American companies are great to do business with.
Most countries, including Brazil, simply don’t have the capability to pull this on their own. Not enough tech talent nor infrastructure
> It is worth noting that despite all this cheap sovereignty talk from Brazil’s president, in practice Brazil would not be able to operate Pix at that scale without heavily relying on American hyperscalers companies.
> American companies are great to do business with.
US officials involving themselves in your national market because they are unhappy with the market share of their companies in it, with the implicit threat of stopping other areas of trade if you dont allow the companies to gain a larger market share makes US companies too untrustworthy to do business with. If Trump implements a trade ban for Brazil, will these hyperscalers continue providing the service at their own risk, or are they going to prioritize their state over their customers? I would assume the answer will be the latter. Given that, I believe it is in Brazil's (and most other states) best interest to divest and reduce partnerships with companies operating in the US
> US officials involving themselves in your national market because they are unhappy with the market share of their companies in it
Just to clarify, for anyone who’s been paying attention to the matter, it’s clear that the true reason for that Section 301 investigation is not due to Pix stealing market share of MC/Visa. In fact, if you check Brazil’s central bank own data, Credit Card usage has not gone down since Pix came in. What Pix really replaced was physical cash.
The fact is that Brazil’s (current) government has been publicly on the other side of Americans interests for a long time, even before Trump’s term. e.g. blatantly ignoring Iran sanctions https://www.cruz.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sen-cruz...
Why would Brazil's government be on the side of American interests on a matter like this?
Pix is clearly mentioned as one of the topics for that investigation due to 'unfairness' and 'harming the competition'.
There are exceptions but the "hyperscalers" and pretty much anything that handles personal information is highly toxic and should be fiercely avoided.
> Most countries, including Brazil, simply don’t have the capability to pull this on their own. Not enough tech talent nor infrastructure
One really wonders how the internet could even have happened before the hyperscalers appeared.
Mostly grumpy IT people handling small racks running VMWare in their office and taking 6 months to set up a VM for you.
I am not joking.
> I am not joking.
Well, I was...
> and taking 6 months to set up a VM for you.
Your sysadmins were extraordinarily grumpy. Were you working with the ur-bofh?
So they get to decide when a transaction is in their national interest and do business on that basis?
That sounds like "sovereignty" to me. You don't need to be fully protectionist to be sovereign.
If you have an ax to grind with Lula, just say so.
Don't get me wrong. But mentioning Brazil's president on this meter just adds even more politics to the discussion. Which global systems don't depend somehow on US infrastructure? Do you have the same opinion about the European leaders that are creating/created cloud infrastructure? I believe just one of the parts is really into adversarial talks lately. Brazil is just following what other countries are also doing.
> But mentioning Brazil's president on this meter just adds even more politics to the discussion.
This quote is literally from the linked article — he is mentioned there
> Do you have the same opinion about the European leaders that are creating/created cloud infrastructure?
I don’t understand the question, I think it’d be great to have an European AWS equivalent just for the sake of competition, but as far as I know, we are very far from that
As long as the foreign companies operate within the country under the country's laws, it shouldn't be a big problem. But being dependent on only one vendor and not having redundancy in the system is a problem though. This is why cash is important to provide the ultimate redundancy against all technological and infrastructural failures.
This is just a legacy of the hopefully-soon-to-be past. We all went way to hard on the aws bandwagon (myself included). I worked for a bit in the past for a company doing 100 mio. API requests daily off of 6 boring old servers.
There is no explicit need for AWS in this. But it was probably easier to build since it is what we are used to.
Yeah we need to accept that sovereignty costs money. American hyperscalers are the cheapest alternative- but freedom isn't free.
Context is important, the Brazil's President said that about USA investigations with allegations that Pix is a "unfair business practices"[0] he is not at all saying that Pix is "100% powered by Brazil", in his political proselytism he does make clear that Brazil and USA are partners by centuries and should keep being.
0. https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/articles/cm2vrnq17vdo
Please, he literally went on national TV on Brazil’s Independence day to claim that
“We will defend PIX from any attempt at privatization. PIX belongs to Brazil, it's public, free, and will remain so.”
Lula has been historically hostile to the US for ideological reasons.
He’s done plenty to undermine that relation, stemming from attacking the dollar dominance, ignoring Iran sanctions, to indirectly financing the Ukraine war by becoming the largest buyer of cheap Russian oil — and that’s why we have those investigations going on
Most of these could could be put another way as protecting sovereignty (and that would be the most charitable interpretation IMHO). Examples:
- "being hostile for ideological reasons" becomes entirely warranted when you consider the many CIA regime-change operations in the past.
- "Undermining the relation" (with the US) is just being smart about how much dependency one has on external factors, like exchange rates and infrastructure.
- The "investigations" are political posturing. PIX is not "unfair business practice", its a modern, cheap, state-of-the-art payments system that is better than what private businesses like MasterCard and Visa are willing to offer. I can think of plenty of ways they could offer actual value to customers so they can still be relevant. The fact that they don't, and chose to try and lobby against it tells me that its a lot cheaper to just buy some politicians and manufacture some controversy instead.
> The "investigations" are political posturing. PIX is not "unfair business practice"
Agree
> its a modern, cheap, state-of-the-art payments system that is better than what private businesses like MasterCard and Visa are willing to offer. I can think of plenty of ways they could offer actual value to customers so they can still be relevant.
This is a common misconception. Pix is a form of bank transfer, not a full blown payment infra like MC/Visa. They are different products, Pix doesn't make credit cards irrelevant.
Per BCB statistics: In 2020, before Pix implementation, credit cards accounted for 2% of the monthly BRL volume transacted (~ 200M BRL)
As of 2025Q4: credit cards still accounted .... for the same 2% (~ 800M BRL)
The main question is: historically, why haven't credit cards been more popular in Brazil, even before Pix?
You'll find your answer looking at structural issues (high interest, delinquency rates, bad credit offerings ...), not technical concerns
> Lula has been historically hostile to the US for ideological reasons.
Care to elaborate and give examples?
You are incorrect.
What went down were apps from banks that use PIX, not the core infrastructure.
That is responsibility of the banks. It means private banks like Itau and Nubank rely on Amazon, not the Central Bank. They relied on those hyperscalers for their operation, and their gateways went down with it.
PIX has sovereign, private infrastructure on brazillian soil managed by Banco Central. NIC.br and other essential services do the same.
PIX is ours.
This is a minor technicality, if private banks are down then the SPI is basically useless. Banks can send money to each other but clients can’t see it.
> What went down were apps
Plus, this is an oversimplification.
Transaction authorization, Fraud/AML screening, account validation are not just part of an “app”, they are core functionality of private banks operations, and they are made scalable by big cloud providers.
The true scaling burden is on private banks not the BCB
> The true scaling burden is on private banks not the BCB
Exactly. That is one of the aspects that allow for the system to be sovereign and scalable. Banco Central controls the core, and that's all it needs to.
This is good design. Descentralized, modern, resilient and efficient.
> Banco Central controls the core, and that's all it needs to. This is good design. Descentralized, modern, resilient and efficient.
I agree. But was that not the case before Pix/SPI? It really didn’t change the status quo.
The STR (transfer reserve system), which SPI is still fully dependent in practice btw, is decentralized, modern and efficient.
The biggest change here was scale and adoption by private banks and end users, not sovereign infra.
That is an offshoot topic which is, in my opinion, irrelevant for the sovereignty discussion.
I'm here just to clear out the confusion regarding the infrastructural pieces. The core PIX is undeniably sovereign and state-owned, and the Amazon downtime was lack of resilience on the part of the banks (which they could have totally designed around but decided not to).
> I'm here just to clear out the confusion regarding the infrastructural pieces. The core PIX is undeniably sovereign and state-owned
Sure, I can see the confusion, I should have made that clearer.
Let me rephrase it: the "core PIX" is mostly an implementation of ISO20022 (pain,pacs, etc) messaging on top of HTTP APIs and BCB's own ledgers, plus a centralized KV datastore (Dict).
The implementation was excellent, but there is no technical moat in the "state-owned" part of the solution
The biggest technical challenges were, by design, delegated to the private sector, heavily relying on US hyperscalers to achieve Pix's operational requirements.
There is a wide misconception that state stuff needs to be fully state-developed. I don't subscribe to that view. Delegating and designing just-enough simple solutions, avoiding bureaucratic tanglements, is an immense challenge and done beautifully in this case.
The other direction (not using standards, owning parts you don't need) would make it for slower adoption, lots of new government responsibilities and very few additional sovereign control. It would be worse.
Building a "technical moat" is for companies which have direct competition. The state can solve this by making regulations. It doesn't need that technical moat, simplicity is better suited. It's acting exactly at the intersection it needs: in the regulation, delegation and coordination realm, not execution.
Yes, but my point was more nuanced, I didn't mean to say that the state needs a fully owned solution.
The original article opens up with "Pix is igniting a geopolitical and commercial battle."
The point I was trying to make, specially in the last paragraph, was that: Brazil doesn't really have full control, or the capability, to operate Pix without US infrastructure. Therefore, it is not smart, to engage in a geopolitical, ideological battle against the US. If Brazil wants to tough it out and claim sovereignty, then it must be willing to walk away and build its own infra.
Case in point: the recent US-Canada tensions were enough for the Canadian government to consider cancelling the purchase of American-made F-35 fighter jets.
Is the Brazilian government willing to do the same? Is it even in its best interest to do so? In my opinion, no, hence the aggressive anti-US rethoric from Lula must stop
Brazil has not started in any ideological battle regarding this. It has developed a national technology, and it allows other payment systems to coexist peacefully in the spirit of honest competition.
The ideological and geopolitical provocations comes from the US. The government is merely defending itself, and being decisive about our sovereignty is not an act of aggression. It's just good statesmanship.
The phrase "PIX is ours" wasn't even directed at the US. It was promoted because a previous Brazilian president tried to attach is personal name to the technology. It was later adopted in that defensive posture, but it was never about fostering any grievances with other payment systems.
Data centers are a commodity, and the US gets tremendous revenue from Brazilian businesses that use it (fourth largest AWS customer location). It's a symbiotic relationship, and there are other countries able to provide computing power if we need to cut ties with it. If that happens, businesses can rent those from somewhere else.
You underestimate our ability to handle these things. Watch us.
In Brazil case, there's actually public banks, and they use Brazilian servers.
It was not. TED had to talk with banks, only the final settlement went thought Central Bank.
With Pix, banks don't talk with each other. They are basically using Central Bank API to send and receive money.
before it was Bank Z ---> Bank Y
With Pix it's Bank X ---> SPI/BC ---> Bank B
Funny annecdote: I have a friend who worked at iFood (brazilian food delivery company) and apparently they moved their entire AWS stack to us-east-1 because sa-east-1 did not have enough capacity to handle the load they had. This is why iFood has a very high latency* during user interactions.
*: for people used to online gaming
Baby steps. If AWS starts unfairly exploiting its market position the way visa and mastercard do then brazil will move pix to another provider
It was not Pix being down, though. This is about banks using US cloud providers. The issue here was with private banks even.
As far I remember, Banco do Brasil and Caixa - both public banks, didn't went down, because they use Brazilian owned servers...
I guess this is largely equivalent to Qvik in Hungary.
- Instantenous transfers (<5 sec hard requirement, usually sub-second) between local banks, - All local banks must implement support (not sure about the deadline, system is working reliably since a few years), - money can be sent or requested (needs approval, of course). - Primary IDs (bank account numbers) and optional secondary IDs (Phone number, email address) can be used - Supports QR codes for requests, - Free from any transfer costs for private people (not sure about companies) under 20M HUF (~50k EUR).
It is implemented using an Erlang according to my information, and is a very robust, well designed and tested scalable system.
You actually have many alternative money transfer systems around the world.
Like Qvik you mention, UPI in India, Blik in Poland, and Swish in Sweden.
Even cross border systems like Revolut pay.
Surprisingly the first system started with MPESA in Kenya. Showing that innovation can happen Africa, and does not need to limited to Europe or the USA.
+SBP in Russia with similar qualities. Russia also implemented compatible Visa/MC backbone which allowed friction-less migration after both companies left country at 2022.
It's surprising that Visa and Mastercard are even private companies. I expected that the government would be in charge of money and not let a group of people impose a 1-3% tax on their population. In the US, credit cards account for "71% of nationwide retail sales dollars".
Governments aren't competent enough to do tech stuff well and they would never make something that works in a different country as well as credit cards do, but still.
Banks are private companies. The Federal Reserve is partially private.
> a group of people impose a 1-3% tax on their population.
It seems the consensus is that a taxes are only bad if you have to pay the government. If it's a small set of companies that collectively own a virtual monopoly, it's because they earned it.
Competition is for losers. - Peter Thiel
This is probably the Holy Grail of neoliberalism: Even taxes are privatized!
If half my local plumber's profits go to private equity, it's capitalism. If half go to taxes, it's socialism.
Most countries have some kind of bank wire system that is in charge of the money itself. Cards are pre-authorization system. The movement of money is authorized when you swipe the card, but not actually moved until up to a few days later, through the existing bank wire systems. If there's a currency conversion involved it can be even trickier.
The US already has a competing payment system for benefits (EBT cards), as do many other countries.
Payments themselves are not a technical challenge, no matter who's doing it. The fundamentals are trivial. You move numbers between accounts.
It's tackling fraud and dealing with disputes that's a challenge.
The hardest part is network effects.
Consider that the largest payment card network on Earth (China UnionPay, 7 billion cards) - decided it was easier just to bootstrap acceptance in the US by a partnership with Discover rather than connecting directly to merchants.
If you want a new scheme to work, distribute something like social security and welfare cheques through it. That immediately forces broad acceptance.
Isn't US EBT card on the same payment network as credit cards? That doesn't count as an independent system. The same set of "they" as Visa/Mastercard gets the fee.
It is not only "their" population. Mastercard and Visa captures a % of each sale done globally with their cards. It is perfectly reasonable for all countries to want to develop their own payment systems and stop paying taxes to the USA.
The US is controlled by finance capital, the elections are just to choose it's spokesperson.
> It's surprising that Visa and Mastercard are even private companies.
Asianometry provides a great summary as to how both of them came to be: For Visa, a 1976 rebranding of the BankAmericard program. For Mastercard, a 1966 meeting of banks as opposition to BankAmericard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2rKS4l6MAk
> Governments aren't competent enough to do tech stuff well and they would never make something that works in a different country as well as credit cards do, but still.
There's some counterexamples: Postal systems, GPS and the internet were started as government projects that now interoperate and cover almost the whole globe.
The Swiss nation bank and other central banks should also do something similar. They are loosing control to private foreign corporations which decide what you can and can not purchase. Not based on laws but on risk.
One of the jobs of the SNB is to enable payments. But because most people are using digital payments now they are loosing this ability and control.
If you get sanctioned by the US you loose access to all digital payment systems. In Switzerland where access to a bank account is a right written in the law you can only use one bank (Postfinance) and this bank has to limit you to basically a useless account (No wires, no credit cards etc.) because even the internal digital payment system (Twint) touches some US system.
Visa is trying hard to take over Japan at the moment and it's painful to watch. I'm really rooting for Pix, because the Visa MasterCard monopoly isn't doing us any favours
Could you elaborate? Genuinely interested.
Visa and MasterCard are basically redundant except for international transactions. We already mostly use QR code payments, which is a semi-open standard and somewhat vendor agnostic(with caveats). It works internationally.
Japan has it's own card companies, and payment systems. Recently, some train lines have started adding support for Visa, but trust me that if you use it in rush hour you will be considered a knob head by everyone behind you as contactless is much slower than the native cards and can't keep up with a fast walking pace. Of course part of the problem here is Sony being greedy and making the international adoption of Felicia hard, but it's complicated.
The cards are most useful for tourists, and the best argument to introduce cards is international compatability. But international interop doesn't have to look like this, it's just how the playing field ended up looking.
Last, Visa and MasterCard are both known for being strict on what goods and services they are happy accepting, and it's not ok that so much power is consolidated in two entities in one country.
I'm not an expert on payment systems, but when I see the large scale advertisements Visa especially are pulling off in Tokyo I see a foreign company trying to disrupt and gain market share while not really benefiting locals who do have mostly moved beyond the need for card payment. I.e my reaction isn't "yay, finally Visa is here too save me" it's "oh no, how will they disrupt and destroy"
Makes sense. I lived there for a year and visit yearly and at the time I didn't notice such an aggressive campaign from Visa.
IC cards indeed are much faster from my experience (in Hong-Kong and Singapore).
I hope we can get rid of Visa and MasterCard because they are the reason we don't have free, instant payments.
India's UPI is also extremely quick and easy to use - instant transfers with just the person's phone number or via a QR code or via a UPI id which looks like an email id.
We are talking about 19-20 billion transactions per month.
Apart from UPI, there are other interbank transfers methods such as NEFT, IMPS, RTGS etc. All quite convenient and easy to use.
In some setups UPI doesn't even internet! Just an SMS is sufficient
I can see the usability aspect, but using an insecure protocol like SMS for something like payment sounds like an absolutely awful idea.
RCS might work as it's a bit more secure (and more importantly: doesn't have a 2G/3G compatible version that criminals might trivially abuse); it even has an optional money sending API in its protocol.
People who are using upi over sms don't have a lot of money. Scamming them isn't worth the trouble.
There is UPI wallet (preload your wallet) that require no internet. But this still require a smartphone.
The SMS option is mainly to avoid requiring a smartphone. There is a huge population that do not have a smartphone.
Online UPI is IMPS, with a good UX
In EU we have multiple national systems, but now they are trying to unify them to the IBAN system, so you can pay in the same way by opening your bank app and scanning a QR code:
https://wero-wallet.eu/
My bank (N26) should support this later this year. I hope it becomes as big and successful as Pix.
Wero sounds similar to the US Zelle system but the big reason for that to exist in the first place is that bank account numbers are not safe to share in the US since they can be used to pull payments so there was never an option for easily transferring money to friends and family other than writing a cheque.
In the UK and Europe I could just share my bank account number or IBAN and make payments through online banking since the late 1990s (though in the UK they only became instant in 2008.) So Wero sounds like a nice convenience but much less of a game changer.
It will be interesting to see if it manages to expand to goods and services since the EU strictly regulates the fees Visa and Mastercard can charge there so there is less incentive to switch than in some other countries.
I think the biggest reason is sovereignty: we cannot risk US cutting our payment system if they for example don't give Greenland for them.
I think this is the biggest reason to ensure you can pay with a local system in shops and restaurants.
That's a very reasonable concern, though given how central Visa and Mastercard are I suspect it is probably necessary to regulate their structures within the EU so that intra-EU payments are not reliant on non-sovereign infrastructure.
Regulating US companies operating in the EU still leaves a kill switch in untrusted hands. It doesn't solve issues like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Guillou problem.
Sharing banking information is not safe in Europe, decades ago a phone scammer convinced me to give them my information and they were able to pull money from my account without any permission from me whatsoever, they just acted like I already signed up to their scam service when I never did. That was a completely foreign and insane idea to me (and it is still insane and should not be allowed) that someone can simply withdraw money from my account. They sent me some contract in the mail that I had to apparently reject and otherwise it was automatically approved. Which itself is surely also not legal but the point is that they were able to take money from my account just with my information.
"decades ago"
Granted, I'm mostly familiar with the Scandinavian bit of Europe, but you can't do jack shit with banking without 2FA which is tied into the national population register.
They decided in the 80ies or 90ies that "relying on knowing secret fixed magic numbers" was not ideal for authenticating people, and sat down and worked out solutions to that problem.
There's still the SEPA direct debit payments in Germany, so you basically give your bank details and the company takes the money out of your account once a month. These don't exist in Scandinavia, but are very much still the norm in Germany.
In the UK direct debits don't require 2FA (but do require approved forms either online or on paper) but you can also very easily get a refund for any direct debit taken from your account so I assume it's simply not worth the scammers' time.
The way SEPA direct debit mandates work is absolutely mind boggling.
You'd expect it to work like Paypal, where you have to sign in to your account to authorize the direct debit mandate and also have the option to revoke it there.
No, the way it works is that you have to print out a form, fill it out and send it to the payee who you are granting the direct debit mandate, e.g. your landlord. Your landlord then sends a copy of the direct debit mandate to your bank and the bank authorizes direct debit payments immediately without asking you.
If you want to revoke the direct debit mandate, you have to send a form to your landlord that you want to revoke the direct debit mandate.
This is mindbogglingly stupid, since the payee has no obligation to process your revocation immediately and can take their sweet time.
Canceling a direct debit mandate has no impact on your obligation to pay rent. It makes no sense that you have to inform the payee and let them gatekeep the revocation. It also makes it possible for unscrupulous people to request a direct debit mandate without your knowledge.
To be pedantic, IBAN isn't a payment system, but only an identifier. It's like an IP address - you still need to enlist the services of an ISP to reach it, and that ISP has to find an actual route and send packets over actual cables.
Wero is just another private company trying get their cut of payment fees. You can do the same thing with SEPA Instant Payment (or some member states outside of the Eurozone have their own similar thing).
I don't see why Wero should exists, their business model seems like "trying to get money for the same service you can get for free".
I couldn't have said it better. I don't understand what they solve.
We need instant, free SEPA transfers around the clock. Switzerland is not part of SEPA but IBAN is used so it is trivial to send payments to foreign accounts that have an IBAN.
I always say that the day Trump decides to block Visa/MasterCard outside the US is the day we get instant payments and finally get rid of cards.
SEPA instant already exists. I think it guarantees sub-10s transactions. Unfortunately it is not the default.
SEPA is only for Euros but there are countries that don't use Euros that still use IBAN (e.g. Switzerland and UK).
The UK has had instant transfers for many years.
Switzerland since last summer, but banks aren't forced to expose the feature to retail customers yet, at least not for free. We could have had that 15 years ago if our government wasn't so afraid of upsetting the banking lobbies.
In Germany we have free instant SEPA transfers. What Wero solves is that you can send money without giving your IBAN number, which at least in Germany can be used to take money from your account.
So you get standardized payment system where you scan a QR code or NFC tag with your bank app and the payment goes through IBAN and the system shows an approval of payment.
It still uses the same systems under the surface.
> your IBAN number, which at least in Germany can be used to take money from your account
What the f#*k?!
It's called SEPA direct debit. For some reason people don't want to use their web bank to pay for things, so what you usually do is you do a SEPA direct debit contract and the company takes the money from your account every month.
> We need instant, free SEPA transfers around the clock.
We have? SCT inst has been rolled out almost everywhere
> Switzerland is not part of SEPA
We definitely are. Transfers in EUR from/to CH IBANs use SEPA rails. CHF accounts can also send or receive EUR transparently (usually at a bad FX rate, but it just works).
> I don't understand what they solve. [...]
> I always say that the day Trump decides to block Visa/MasterCard outside the US is the day we get instant payments and finally get rid of cards.
You answered your own question. We need pan-European payments systems on top of the existing banking infrastructure. Payments and transfers aren't the same thing. By moving to mobile wallets with QR code and NFC payments, this opens up interoperability beyond Europe too.
> We have? SCT inst has been rolled out almost everywhere
That is true; I should have said "EEA" or "countries supporting IBAN".
> We definitely are. Transfers in EUR from/to CH IBANs use SEPA rails. CHF accounts can also send or receive EUR transparently (usually at a bad FX rate, but it just works).
Yes, which is exactly my point. We need it to work for CHF as well. Instant payments are not the norm and in fact UBS is charging for it.
> You answered your own question. We need pan-European payments systems on top of the existing banking infrastructure. Payments and transfers aren't the same thing. By moving to mobile wallets with QR code and NFC payments, this opens up interoperability beyond Europe too.
A payment should be a bank transfer. Anything more complicated is just something that is to be exploited by middle-men.
This is a false dichotomy. You can have very cheap transaction fees, Pix is state-run and probably operates at a loss, with merchant fees as low as 0.2~0.3%. In comparison the cheapest card payment under the EEA interchange cap is probably slightly above 0.5% when you add scheme fees and PSP costs.
However businesses do require payment systems and not just barebones bank transfers. Except for high trust, low volume transactions such as buying a car, paying your rent...
> A payment should be a bank transfer. Anything more complicated is just something that is to be exploited by middle-men.
I disagree with that. Payments (especially online and contactless ones) should have some form of buyer protection, chargeback and a way to handle fraudulent transaction, lost / stolen cards, etc.
> buyer protection, chargeback and a way to handle fraudulent transaction
There is; it's called a bank.
wero is a european initiative set up by a consortium of banks that is built layered upon instant payments. it's not a private company like paypal or visa, its an attempt at making European payment infrastructure
Sweden has a similar "initiative" set up by a consortium of banks (Swish), as do many other European countries.
Usually these systems raise their fees after being established, sometimes even higher than Visa/Mastercard.
Brazil's Pix is something else. It wasn't created by private entities to make money.
Wero's Dutch predecessor, iDEAL, has been an established part of online payments for 20 years now.
As barely anyone has a credit card and very people want to deal with the faff of manually entering billing codes or account numbers, iDEAL usage is near universal for online payments. I don't recall fees ever going up as an end customer.
Card fees aren't paid by end customers either. The Swedish iDEAL equivalent, Swish, is more expensive than cards for smaller transactions (below 15 euros). Wero will be like Swish, not Pix.
Wero is not something that "will be", Wero already is. It used to be called something else for decades, but that doesn't change much.
Yep. The new thing is that you can pay your groceries with it in the supermarket early next year.
What I was reading, you're supposed to be able to send money to people with it this summer, pay in internet shops late this year and supermarkets and restaurants will follow in 2027.
Wero does several things. You can already send instant payments if you fill out IBAN and such, but entering order numbers, account references, and other such cruft for purchasing products is a pain. Companies receiving such payments also need to connect payment to a user and update their digital processes somehow. Wero offers such a solution so you don't have to find a PSD2 processor (which will probably cost just as much).
For interpersonal transactions I don't really see the advantage here, but for commercial use cases it's got a solid product and purpose.
Wero doesn't stand to benefit much from payment fees as European payment fees are already rather slim compared to, for instance, American ones (crazy things like percentages of purchase price with a minimum amount!).
So how can a QR code not supply the necessary data? Example:
Any bank app should be able to read this. What is so complicated? Right, nothing. Credit card companies are a hidden tax, worse, they are a tax on turnover, not profits.
It can, in fact there is even an open standard for that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPC_QR_code
By the way credit card companies do a lot more than Wero, SEPA or any other similar instant payment solution (e.g. chargeback).
Brazilian here! For people from other countries, I can say with 100% certainty: There's not a single chance of Brazil's Pix going away — even if a far-right government wins and aligns with the USA. Even then, it's impossible. The ONLY way this could ever happen is if the USA invades Brazil.
Seems fairly logical for any large country to create something like this. Visa/MC is nice but allows the US to apply undue pressure to individuals. E.g. the US applied financial sanctions on ICC officials in the EU resulting in them losing access to Visa/MC credit cards and banks even those are that are purely EU based.
> Visa/MC is nice but allows ...
Not sure how it is overseas - but in the US, the #1 problem with Visa/MC is the huge percentage that they skim off every transaction. Businesses running on tight profit margins often give a discount if you pay with cash instead.
I think the fees are on order of 1-3% depending on your risk and business type. Certainly an issue but it's mitigated a bit by the decreased costs of going cashless. I.e. cashless operations avoids theft by employees; overhead for stocking, counting, and handling money; reduced insurance due to less chances of robbery; etc.
It's baffling to me how the US thinks they are entitled to anything related to this. Calling Visa and Mastercard global credit companies is a stretch, they're clearly American monopolies.
Brazil can do this. Why can't we?
Vietnam has a system like this too, QR based and free. India has UPI.
QR payments are ubiquitous in South East Asia. The eventual goal is ASEAN-wide interoperability, and some are even already interoperable with South Korean, Japanese and Chinese counterparts. And as expected, the US is also complaining about those, merely because Americans can't grasp the concept, like how they lag on pin adoption.
Most likely because your country's banks are heavily lobbying against such initiatives.
It's easy to blame Visa and Mastercard, but the reason why the EU doesn't have this is that the EPP (the largest political group in the European Parliament) answers to European banks, which don't want it.
The EU is literally working on an alternative as we speak: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...
I think the cryptocurrency-based implementation is stupid and a product of its time, but the EU is investing a lot of money into a system to push Visa and Mastercard out.
Many countries have their own payment systems already, often widely successful. Integration between these systems has been annoying but things have started to centralize on two or three systems across Europe now.
The EU would obviously benefit from a digital euro, but the banks won't give up without a fight:
https://euperspectives.eu/2026/02/digital-euro-timeline-at-r...
>Private banks are resistant to a digital euro both as a payment method and a store of value. The digital euro is designed to be a free, public payment method, directly challenging fee-based systems operated by banks. This is its key usefulness in terms of sovereignty. But it could also be used as a digital wallet and users may move their money out of private bank accounts to central bank-backed digital euro wallets meaning banks lose out.
So far they have successfully delayed any implementation.
The original release was a proof of concept. That proof of concept is currently being developed into a fully-fledged proposal. Once that proposal is accepted, and legislation is ready, the first actual implementations can begin.
I don't think you can call it a "delay", the project just moves at a glacial pace.
The entire project was never going to finish before 2030. Some banks are upset about it, for sure, but others are in favour.
who are we?
I think it's an echo of "If Japan can... why can't we?"
https://youtu.be/vcG_Pmt_Ny4?si=KbAxOSFSjoPT3vK_
I could be wrong.
I´m always baffled by the fact that PIX discussions (almost?) never address issues of privacy: the whole system is offered (and run) by the Brazilian central bank. Due to its popularity here, the central bank has enormous, detailed and live insight into a citizen´s financial life.
Even the dullest and most unimaginative civil servant / tax office employee / security or police member must have wet dreams imagining all the possibilities...
Yeah, but it is technically protected by "Sigilo bancário" law:
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigilo_banc%C3%A1rio
Meaning you need a court order to get access to personal transfer statements and the government already forced private institutions from reporting certain types of transactions to the central government.
It is not ideal, since this is not a constitutional right, just a law. But not that different from how it was before. However I believe the central bank can use anonamized data, which can be a good (analytics on where population spend money) or a bad (cracking down on certain types of business) thing.
Also it has come to a point that data going to private companies (like VISA/Mastercard) always ends up sold to private (and usually foreign) data-brokers to make profiles on you, at least the gov doesn't do that*. The main argument is that PIX is killing cash transactions, that is the _real_ loss here.
Like the political targeted ads backed by Russia during the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal, preventing foreign companies from analytics on your population is now a national security concern.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica
As if Visa and Mastercard did not sell customer data...
I have a credit card from BB, and I also use pix from time to time but not as much as a credit card. When Uncle Sam started bullying PIX I did what I never thought I would actually do. Since I can't stop using credit card (because it's helpful in my life) I canceled my Visa card with BB and requested ELO cc, created in 2011 by Bradesco, Banco do Brasil, and Caixa, not regretting anything. Blowing out someone else’s candle doesn’t make yours shine any brighter.
Hey Visa/Mastercard — try that move in China and see how well it turns out.
Happens all the time: https://ustr.gov/search?q=initiates+section+301+investigatio...
Visa and MC definitely use their consumer features (subsidized by merchants) to help maintain the duopoly, and a huge one is global acceptance. Does something like Pix require a strong, trustworthy central bank, and can it work outside of your home country? Or do even modern banking countries run into the LCD issue with international settlement?
I've been living abroad for over a decade now, so I never got to experience Pix.
I went back to Brazil a few years ago for a couple of weeks, and a kid on the streets asked me if I could buy some chewing gum and help him out. I wanted to, but I had no cash, so I told him I had no cash at all.
He said "It's fine, just send me some with Pix".
I still remember the incredulous look on his face when I told him I also didn't have Pix. He was certain I was lying. "_Everyone_ has it. How come you don't?"
had the same experience.. "how come you dont have Pix?"
> "_Everyone_ has it. How come you don't?"
To put it in context: everyone with a Brazilian bank account can use Pix. That's the reason "everyone" has it.
That's underselling it. Even people without a bank account have Pix.
There is also UPI in India, and I assume something coming soon from China.
I sometimes do wonder if these Goverment can work together on a single payment system, federally operated but connected.
Every country should have this.
Why would you let America take 2-3% of your transaction volumes?
It perhaps made sense when the technology was difficult, and America was trusted, but ...
I misunderstood, psd2 is Europe's equivalent.
And yes, every country should have this. Even America
PSD2 is merely a framework for an uniform access to banking, same APIs everywhere. While you can send money through it, it's still through the same means as normal.
Many of the european countries have their own "Pix", but there's no European-wide alternative. The ECB wants to make one (tentatively titled "digital euro"), but it's going to take a long time to come out.
There are plans for interoperability between the various European payment apps.
My local app (MB Way, PT) can be used to send money to Spain and Italy. Others will follow.
https://www.mbway.pt/a-interoperabilidade-e-o-futuro-dos-pag... (link in portuguese)
Wero is the alternative, it's moving on quite well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment)
> Why would you let America take 2-3% of your transaction volumes?
I don't think VISA/Mastercard takes such a fee? (They'd be some of the biggest companies in the world if they did.)
The fees they charge are actually fractions of a percent, the rest are charged by the card issuer, which is usually your bank.
You could, in theory, use the VISA network and not pay those fees to a card issuer.
Still greater than 0.
There's absolutely no reason for a country to outsource paynent infrastructure to US corporations.
> You could, in theory, use the VISA network and not pay those fees to a card issuer.
You can not. The only way is to have a private agreement with the card issuer. That's why stores all try to push their co-branded cards.
It's interesting that we live in 2026 and people still don't understand the fees of credit card processing.
Visa charges only a Assessment fee the majority goes to Issuer Bank +PSP.
E.g: Interchange fee (0.8-1.8%): Paid by acquirer to issuer (card-holding bank)
Assessment fee (0.1-0.3%): Paid to card network (Visa, Mastercard)
Acquirer margin (0.3-0.8%): Retained by merchant’s payment processor
The banks and the payment processors are the real customers of the payment networks and they all do better when they can squeeze more money from the end users - the cardholders and the businesses. Pix cuts out these middlemen and that’s an existential threat to their business model, ergo an “investigation” by the Trump admin.
The army of middlemen with their hands out is the worst part, where you also have fees paid to the merchant bank, the iso/payment service provider, and a chain of agents. In disfavored industries like adult content, this can reach 15% or more, plus thousands in annual "high risk" fees (even if chargeback rate is good). It's a huge anticompetitive racket, and the sooner US can shake off Visa/MasterCard, the better off we'll be.
All should be free. Imagine if government decided to impose 3% revenue tax, yet these companies get a free pass.
If these networks cannot run this for free, then they should be nationalised and tax payer should cover it. It will be cheaper (because it will become non-profit) for everyone and better.
Cash handling also costs businesses money so I'm not sure it needs to be free, just strictly regulated.
Many banks already require monthly or annual payments for keeping an account with them. They also use the money from deposits to lend it at high interest rates. It is not like the banks are not extracting much more than a fair share of revenue from a captive market.
EU regulations limit those interchange fees to 0.2% for debit card transactions and 0.3% for credit card transactions so total costs are much lower for businesses. Cards have replaced cash even for small transactions in most European countries.
Any percentage based fee for processing a transaction is borderline criminal.
Add an extra fixed fee if you need 3D Secure (and equivalents). This should be covered already by the assessment and interchange fees to begin with.
Card networks' moat is their network effect. If you need to take a payment from someone around the world, cards are very convenient. Unless Pix and friends get to interop globally, cards will always have a place.
> Why would you let America take 2-3% of your transaction volumes?
And spy on every single transaction
It made sense back in the 1970s when it was hard for an American to pay for a hotel room in Manilla.
But in 2026 data moves in a micro second from one continent to another.
Exactly and if you think 2-3% is a small number you should keep in mind that that is effectively half of what the market returns over the long-term at 7%.
> Every country should have this
Many countries do, it's really more common than you might think. The problem is international payments and things like tourism. Want to order something from another country? Want to go there for a week and not have to use cash? In most cases it's either Visa or MasterCard.
It would be Un-American to overlook any chance to forcibly intervene in a Latin America country for the financial benefit of a large American company...wouldn't it?
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/12/amer...
The main issue in this market is that the consumer doesn’t pay the cost of the transaction, therefore there is no pressure to reduce costs, and hence no innovation. All of this could be solved if a government regulated that consumers must pay the fee. Here, in the UK, we have obviously regulated the exact opposite of a sensible regulation and were “shocked” when total fees paid on transactions exploded.
TIL that there are fees for Pix under certain circumstances (e.g. as a business receiving payments). I mostly use Pix for person-to-person transactions, and those are free (and instantaneous).
I don't even remember how we used to split bills back in the day anymore.
In India there is 'UPI' system that is similar.
The only problem I actually face with Pix in Brazil is:
Some stores only accept Pix and don’t want Visa or cash. As a tourist, you end up unable to access a lot of things because, well, we don’t have Pix.
While I was in Brazil, some thugs with pistols came into a bar where I was. They forced people to send a Pix payment to a specific account, and their money was gone. In the credit card era, I guess the companies, insurance providers, and banks could reverse the transaction and cover the losses. With Pix, as I understand it, nobody feels responsible for it and the money is gone.
Reminder: always travel with a spare phone with a broken screen just in case.
> While I was in Brazil, some thugs with pistols came into a bar where I was. They forced people to send a Pix payment to a specific account, and their money was gone.
Sorry, don't mean to be rude, but your story doesn't track for many reasons. First, PIX keys are associated to formal bank accounts. If what you described happend, that account was blocked by the bank likely within the hour after the 'robbery'. And "stealing" accounts from other people in a way that allows you to withdraw cash from is exceedingly difficult and uncommon.
Furthermore, it might have been possible in early days of pix, but it's been some time now (maybe from the start? Making your story impossible) that Pix has a 'undo' feature that the sender can do on their bank app or ATM even; similar to the 'block this credit transaction' from a credit card.
> With Pix, as I understand it, nobody feels responsible for it and the money is gone.
Incorrect, see above. Are you confusing PIX for some kind of crypto transfer?
Looking forward to a European-wide payment system. Sure, there are apps probably in each individual country that you can use to pay (via a QR code) or easily transfer money (usually using a phone number). But there are cases like renting a car or paying abroad which are not covered. Seems a bit crazy considering this is a common market. Why don't these apps look to expand more aggresively in the EU? I know there's Wero, but why aren't they more bald in their approach? I also know there's the digital euro promoted by the European Commission, but I'm not holding my breath for that. It takes way too long and my feeling is that it is being used mostly to pressure the US. I don't think we'll be able to use it anytime soon.
Yes, I agree. It's a bit weird because finally, after decades SEPA ICT is here and could be used to back this thing. It just needs to be more user-friendly.
Despite what the White House thinks American companies are not owed a business model.
...unless they generously grease the right palms, or push the right "us vs. them" buttons.
Heh, Lula has a just slight lead on the elections this year.
If he cedes to the pressure, odds are he will so completely destroy his popularity that he won't even be able to be a candidate. He almost certainly knows that.
The pressure is irrelevant. Pix is not going away.
Philippines has QR/Instapay. Not sure if it's complete equivalent of PIX. But basically you can scan a QR code and you can pay using any bank or digital wallet.
Visa and Mastercard are just secret services of the USA by now.
Couldn't be more glad that Trump is unknowingly bringing down that hegemony and freeing us from the arm twisting USA.
a question for Ukrainians who maybe rode to Brazil and got to try Pix: is it this fast? is monobank faster or slower than Pix?
They're not really comparable because Pix is interbank while monobank in Ukraine is a single bank.
I know, but with almost every third Ukrainian above 14 having a mono card we can at least compare the UX (speed, steps required, ease of use, etc.)
Pix is a great alternative for cash but a poor alternative for credit card. The safety is abysmal IMHO.
When ever I visit Brazil now I feel very left out for not having Pix! I wanna join the electronic cash club. Don't think it's possible for foreigners tho
It should be possible, they issue CPF numbers even for tourists if you want.
Problem is you need a Brazilian bank account... Opening a foreign bank account creates tax nightmares.
Ah, so they're leaving the money on the table. I suppose they're worried about money laundering.
Indonesia's electronic wallet have two tiers, unverified and verified. You don't even need a bank account (because most people don't), just a local number (which even tourist can buy easily at airport), with the limitation on unverified tier is that you can only top it up (by cash if you don't have local bank account) and spend it on merchant, no receiving nor sending money. There's also transaction limit but most of the population won't cross that in normal days.
The reason Pix needs a Brazilian bank account, is that at its core, it's just a bank transfer mechanism, like the older TED or DOC. Pix sends money from one bank account to another bank account. The main novelties are being instant, working 24h per day, and being able to use keys like a phone number or email as destinations (the Brazilian Central Bank has a central database which maps these keys to the bank account numbers).
I am Brazilian and I can tell PIX is the future of transactions. It's free (until now), fast and easy. All the world should adept it, plus with bitcoin at my opinion
How difficult is for USA administration learn good practices and initiatives and think into implementing those? And also, why Master and Visa haven’t came with a solution where they integrate with all of that and innovate?
This idea that all they do should be de facto standard for the whole world is so démodé.
My understanding is that FedNow could become something like Pix, but implementation is voluntary. In Brazil, the central bank required all retail banks of significance to implement Pix by a certain deadline.
Visa and Mastercard are very much against FedNow becoming widely used, as it would destroy their business.
For what MAGA views as good for the USA is actually deplorable loss for the civilized world.
>And also, why Master and Visa haven’t came with a solution where they integrate with all of that and innovate?
There are a lot of people who integrate with them. The issue is that anyone who does so must comply with the PCIDSS. Most hobbyists cant stretch that far and use intermediaries.
>This idea that all they do should be de facto standard for the whole world is so démodé.
I dont know what Brazil's issues were, but Visa and Mastercard show up, they integrate with terminal providers directly and indirectly, and they bring a battle tested data security standard with them. Compared to other industries they are basically self regulating, and in some countries they adopt the PCI DSS into law.
Duopolists whining about competition eh?
If there is a company in New Zealand working on a similar system, I'd love to hear about it because I would like to work for you.
Some coverage from September:
Brazil's Homegrown Payment System Is Target of Trump Admin https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/world/americas/brazil-dig...
The article is very hard to read with all of the ads on the site.
Pix is for domestic use right? So tourists who come to Brazil still use Visa and Mastercard as well as Brazilian tourists who travel abroad. Visa and Mastercard are companies of the past, crypto and stablecoins will destroy them sooner or later.
"crypto and stablecoins will destroy them sooner or later."
LOL!
I meant digital dollar and digital euro, you won't need Visa and Mastercard anymore.
Dollar is already "digital", and has been for the last 50 years or so.
I meant this https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency..., this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_euro and this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_renminbi
It's just buzzwordy bullshit. The European system is just a classic credit/debit system. The Chinese system is a bit more sophisticated, with offline capability and smart contracts.
But it doesn't use any distributed proof-of-work/stake stuff.
No, for example Argentinian tourists use Belo[1] for paying in Brazil. No need for credit cards.
[1] https://www.belo.app/en-us/ar/
How many transactions can you ran per second on major coins like BTC?
Cross border payment with QR codes are already a thing in plenty of Southeast and East Asian countries. Crypto and stablecoins aren't needed (nor wanted, due to money laundering risks).