> Pismo’s platform will also enable Visa to provide support and connectivity for emerging payment rails, like Pix in Brazil, for financial institution clients.
Pix is an existial threat to banks and their idiotic TED transfers which they charge actual money for. "Banking services" they call it. To that, I say good riddance. Why the hell should anyone pay a bank even one cent for any reason? They should pay us. They should be competing to see who can pay us most for the money we deposit into their fractional reserve scam. It offends me that these banks think they can charge money to update records in a database.
[portuguese] https://economia.uol.com.br/noticias/redacao/2023/02/21/pix-...
The rollout was structured in a way that pretty much every single bank in the country started taking up Pix payments with no friction, so you can send money to almost everywhere. Aside from that, you can setup emails, mobile phones, random hashes, and Brazilian ID numbers as Pix keys to transfer to and fro.
And yeah well, the mobile-friendly UI is a thing because most bank apps here have abysmal desktop UIs and I would go as far as saying they have (pretty much) given up on developing those to focus on the mobile user base instead.
There are also more use cases covered. Instead of you having to type all the info of you are paying, they can print out a code for you, with the value/their info. So you can just copy/paste/read qr code. This allows business to use Pix to handle internet payments very easy, during checkout, they just generate a Pix code, that you pay and it confirms your payment in a couple of seconds.
It is also something that the Central Bank of Brazil setup, so there is no profit motif except for fees charged only to business that use it, to cover operating costs. Every single bank that I'm aware of in Brazil quickly implemented it.
Basically a better e-mail token verification: you know the person actually has access to their bank account and is not an impersonator.
We were actually the first to do that, but the advantages of an instant payment system are endless. This same thing could be done for many other use cases.
The degree of fraud with credit cards is huge in Brazil, so for us it wouldn’t bring about trust in a legal setting: someone could’ve just cloned your card and signed a document in your stead, without you ever knowing. Pix has the added benefit that the person needs to physically hold the phone, input the bank passcode and/or biometrics, in order to pay it.
I won't get into the actual implementation details of both solutions, but the way Pix changed the finance landscape of Brazil is something else.
The major difference for me personally is the fact that Pix transfers are instant as in instant messaging instead of Interac's (more often than I'd like) 30min transfers.
Also, paying anything via Interac is kind of awkward compared to Pix's UX flows implemented by Brazilian banks. Can't quite explain it but it's there. Pix is one of the things I miss most from Brazil, and I'm glad Canada's Interac is as prevalent as it is otherwise it'd be a huge step down.
[1]: https://www.bcb.gov.br/content/estabilidadefinanceira/pix/Re...
Then it debits from your bank account to the popcorn seller account in < 1 second?
This is the reason Visa and Mastercard are being beaten hard on this market.
The whole retail banking experience in Canada is very, very far behind what we have in Brazil. A few things that shocked me:
* How physical paper cheques are still being used and mailed
* Not all banks have scheduled transfers (useful for things like rent)
* Large transfers between accounts takes multiple days (wtf) as opposed to a couple of hours (TED)
* bizarre scams like "credit card insurance"
* not having debit and credit in the same physical card
* poor fintech/digital bank ecosystems, nothing close to Nubank
I could probably come up with more examples.
The proper phrase is "add value." You're welcome.