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Comment by jitendrac | Hacker News Reader

Transferring the $1 vs $1000 digitally, have no technical difference and hence the commission based payment cut is something that I have a hard time to accept.

Btw I am from India. Earlier,every time I see people swipe the cards in the retail stores, I felt sorry for the shopkeepers as they had to bear the 1.5%-2% as transaction charges of the total amount paid.

It all changed after the launch of UPI payment system, now I can just pay 5-10 INR(7 cents to 13 cents) to a shopkeeper without feeling the guilt of payment charges. It has been more than two years when I used my last VISA card payment transaction for any retail shopping. I think other countries should also develop such not-for-profit payment network system that can be used to pay efficiently digitally without making any side the victim.

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Brazil's Pix[1] completely transformed the way we deal with payments day-to-day. It's available 24/7, free of fees and has really good UX. Many small merchants are giving up on credit card and accepting only Pix. And the Central Bank of Brazil keeps pushing Pix's capabilities forward. Last year they launched two features that can be translated something like Pix Withdrawals and Pix Change (Pix Saque and Pix Troco in Portugues). The two features work similarly. Essentially they turn every commercial site into an ATM. You make a Pix to, say, a supermarket and get that money in cash. Or, in the case of Pix Change, you'd pay in Pix more than the total value of the purchase and receive the change in cash.

Pix is not even 2 years old and it's already changed the way people deal with money. It's incredibly reliable and astonishingly fast.

Who would say that the biggest Brazilian fintech revolution of all times would come from the Central Bank?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(electronic_payment_system...

Also, Marc Rubinstein covered Pix in his newsletter some time ago https://www.netinterest.co/p/paying-faster-99d.

I'm a brazilian living in Brazil and I can't overstate how much of a game changer Pix is. The Brazilian Central Bank did an outstanding job.

Instant transactions, zero fees, available to anyone with a bank account.

Now we just have to integrate it with other countries.

Is Pix a public version of Venmo?

Seems like some of the Pix => cash features are different.

(Your link is missing the final closing parenthesis.)

Sounds similar to what I used in New Zealand quite a few years ago. However their system wasn't confined to mobile apps. Is pix mobile only?

Also in that system payments reconciled that evening, it wasn't instantaneous. To be honest I preferred that. I was able to fix a payment with a mistake before it went out.

> I felt sorry for the shopkeepers as they had to bear the 1.5%-2% as transaction charges of the total amount paid

I used to feel that way. Then I discovered how much time/effort is spent counting cash. Credit cards are all electronic and so the money goes directly into your bank accounts without needing to count and recount all that cash. Companies are money ahead vs cash once they account for all the labor cash costs. That is before we get into all the costs of theft that you avoid.

The above assumes a straight 2% transaction fee. If you are paying $.25/transaction then for small purchases the transaction costs are way too high.

The transaction fees are flat 1.5%-2% for regular credit cards(may climb upto 4% for reward or amex type of premium offerings). The retail grocery business has gross margin of 8-10% which ultimately settles to net profit of 4%-5%. and paying almost half of your net profit for transaction fees is insane. In any case, the government owned non-profit digital payment system is really a great idea. People tend to have increased digital transaction which were unaccounted in the past, which also gives the correct data to government regarding current country financial habits.

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