Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard
elciudadano.com
elciudadano.com
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.
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.
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
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.
In any case, the digital euro seems to take years (earlier expected date is 2029). I don't understand why it takes so long.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Initiative
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Alliance
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.
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.
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+.
That's why I'm telling each merchant I come bye to use it. super simple.
[1] https://www.dbs.com.sg/personal/deposits/pay-with-ease/payno...
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.
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.
nnn.nnn.nnn-nn
A CPF is nationally unique.
You also have a RG/RNE which is unique per state. Not too often you get asked for this one though.
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.
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.
International money exchange has always been fun, luckily for us we never really travelled anywhere that you couldn't just use dollars.
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.
Of course you need a backup at some point, but it’s just that: a backup.
Convenience of use with your phone is one thing. Requiring a (locked-down, attestated) phone to create an account is another thing entirely.
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.
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.
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.
If your Wise account is Brazilian. If you have a foreign account, base currency or whatever the name is for that concept, you cannot.
What still make credit cards strong in Brazil it's installments though...
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 :)
In Spanish:
https://cincodias.elpais.com/companias/2026-04-01/a-partir-d...
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.
The EU is not perfect, but these kind of black and white comments highlight why it can be slow to align everyone to get on board with an idea. The empty vessle makes the most noise.
The EU has had the plumbing needed for this since at least 2 decades, yet has not managed to create this.
> If developing countries can build one over the course of a decade
What countries are you talking about ? The EU countries have some, we also have instant IBAN transfers without any payment processor, we have PCI compliance in all banks to allow it. This feels like another example of you not knowing what you're talking about when you say 'The EU has had the plumbing needed for this since at least 2 decades, yet has not managed to create this.'.
The foundations to never rely on payment processors is already there, now we need to remove the dependancy on payments like visa and mastercard because of nescessity. And as someone above posted, it in progress, it will be done standardised across the entire EU, in Brazil, it's one country.
Edit : There was also never a demand for it because the EU reasonably assumed it could rely on US partners to cover areas in which the EU didn't focus. Only recently those priorities changed, politics has that effect here of dealing with the most pressing issues and not those that are lobbied for the hardest.
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.
Like everywhere: lobby and corruption. Works like a charm. Being based in the "World policeman" also helps.
When your business depends on a customer focused payment, your primary goal is reach, more possible customers, bigger market. If a competitor or offering lower fees, it's still fees, of which those userbase might cross over. I hate this framing of the problem as a "well it's the shops fault"
It's short sighted limiting. And ridiculously oversimplified. Steam being dictated what they can sell being a great example thanks to pressure from the visa and MC duopoly.
I'm also not very well versed in what you mean about Steam; are there specific types of games that Visa and MasterCard have prevented them from selling recently? I've used that service for a number of years now, and usually the only titles I don't see on there are ones that have some kind of exclusivity deal either with a gaming console, or with Epic or whatever. I know that they had some controversy a while back over the game "Hatred".
I have also been a little grossed out at the amount of Hentai-like content they've started to allow on their platform, but once I turned on the "Hide adult-content" setting, and setup a few additional filters, it's been pretty painless for me. Is there other types of games that they want to sell, but have been prevented from selling?
It also works with some big German retailers outside of Germany (like with Billa in Austria which is a subsidiary of Rewe Group)
Maestro and Visa just stopped offering Maestro/V-Pay so they can charge the higher fees vor Visa/MasterCard. The only thing that changed is the Co-Badge on most Girocards
Well this is flat out wrong. Every countries banking system pays fees for processing visa and MasterCard. When there is a viable alternative in place with less fees, the bank like any money making enterprise will take it. Framing it as "countries" blocking it demonstrates you either have an agenda against EU or you're not sure how the EU works.
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...
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/china-indonesia-have...
Pix is no local as a user, you can use it without a CPF: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48053527>.
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 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.)
[1] https://www.macobserver.com/news/brazils-antitrust-authority...
[2] https://9to5mac.com/2026/02/19/apple-accuses-brazilian-banks...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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 shocks me how well it works sometimes. Literally press pay and move eyeballs to notifications and it's there already.
Most people don't experience the full scope of Pix which is impressive.
It's like WhatsApp but with money!
If the e-krona happens, that would be a better comparison.
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.
What cards are you taking about that are cheaper than that?
People still increasingly pay their rent here via eInterac.
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.
It’s just that there are billion dollar entrenched companies that do not want sending money to be as easy as a click.
There’s a bunch of weird corner cases that come with that. What if the receiving account ID doesn’t exist, or the recipients bank flags the transaction, or the sender closes their account before the recipients bank has applied their end of the transaction.
I think some of these transfer systems are simpler because they’re global so both records are in the same database. Transactions can be technically atomic rather than organizationally atomic (ie atomicity is present in the technology, rather than approximated by processes).
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
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.
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)
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...
How much does this matter in the context of paying in BRL, to a BRL merchant, in Brazil?
What's with people complaining that they can't terminate transfers out of their accounts?
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.
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
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.
In fact, the BRL amount settled via TED is still higher than Pix, although the gap seems to be closing
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.
And remember that credit card fees are greater in Brazil
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.
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!
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.
"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-...
Why not? This is such an American point of view that sounds similar to why the IRS doesn't offer easier tax filing options.
I always hear that the government is inefficient, should be easy no?
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.
I am glad to see the EU following Brazil with its own payment system.
Visa/MasterCard/Paypal era is gone!!
Americans will be "pro free market" until it's somebody else doing the competition, then they will be very butthurt about it (at best)
This habit is starting to do more harm than good (to them) and they should try to focus on innovating the way China does.
US foreign policy does not benefit Americans, it benefits the elites.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's some counterexamples: Postal systems, GPS and the internet were started as government projects that now interoperate and cover almost the whole globe.
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...
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
> 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
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...
Pix is clearly mentioned as one of the topics for that investigation due to 'unfairness' and 'harming the competition'.
One really wonders how the internet could even have happened before the hyperscalers appeared.
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?
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.
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
There is no explicit need for AWS in this. But it was probably easier to build since it is what we are used to.
“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
- "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.
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
Care to elaborate and give examples?
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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
And yes, literally banks had to "talk" with each other. Which is why it was paid and slower in first place and didn't worked 24/7.
You clearly don’t know what you are talking about since you are conflating the STR (transfer reserve system) with TED (one of the many settlement methods in STR)
And yes, in TED only the final settlement were done by BCB.
The goal with Pix was not to increase the total amount of value tranfered, but the amount of small micro-transactions, increasing fluidity and bypassing unecessary bureacratic processes.
TED still wins by raw value, but that amount is irrelevant. It is what is left after the small-fry micro-transactions were liberated from complicated, archaic systems. Those small-fry transactions provided a lot of fluidity to the market, which is the realm in which Visa and Mastercard were supposed to act (incresing consumption) but were unable to compete due to their own legacy devices. They really need to catch up with the competition: those systems and their culture are ancient relics.
*: for people used to online gaming
As far I remember, Banco do Brasil and Caixa - both public banks, didn't went down, because they use Brazilian owned servers...
Caixa was down yesterday: https://www.techtudo.com.br/google/amp/noticias/2026/05/caix...
- 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.
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.
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.
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 ...
And yes, every country should have this. Even America
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.
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)
The issue to solve is payments, Portugal for instance has its Multibanco payment scheme, but it's only used in Portugal. I assume eventually it'll be cobranded with Wero like it happened to Netherlands' iDEAL and eventually fully replaced.
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.
There's absolutely no reason for a country to outsource paynent infrastructure to US corporations.
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.
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
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.
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.
And spy on every single transaction
But in 2026 data moves in a micro second from one continent to another.
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.
My bank (N26) should support this later this year. I hope it becomes as big and successful as Pix.
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 this is the biggest reason to ensure you can pay with a local system in shops and restaurants.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
What the f#*k?!
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.
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.
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...
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.
There is; it's called a bank.
The most common scams nowadays involve social engineering to make people log into their online banking and transfer money, specifically because there's no way to revert transactions. The victims are typically 100% liable as they accept and authorize these.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtbihSwrKhk
https://www.srf.ch/sendungen/kassensturz-espresso/kassenstur...
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.
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.
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.
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!).
payment://iban=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX&amount=12.34EUR
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).
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"
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.
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.
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?
This is such a common occurrence that the BCB had to impose a default $200 nightly limit for Pix trns between 8pm and 6am.
The way it works is, criminals use money mules, or stolen identities, to open legitimate bank accounts, then once the cash hits the account, they fan out the stolen proceeds to crypto rails or other money mules (“laranjas”)
BCB has been trying to solve this with MED 2.0 but it is still a duct tape over the real problem: rampant crime and fraud in Brazil
And let’s not dive into the digital bank heists that have been happening since the last year, when hackers have already managed to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from the financial system by exploiting Pix’s 24/7 network [0]
Such attack to the financial system would have been akin to a war declaration in serious countries, but crime is so widespread and normalized that Brazilians lowered their standards to accept these absurd situations
[0] Hackers steal R$400m in attack on Pix-connected fintech: https://valorinternational.globo.com/google/amp/markets/news/2025/07/02/hackers-steal-r400m-in-attack-on-pix-connected-fintech.ghtml> 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.
There you have the straw man ou front man accounts, when the bank comes to act, they have 96 hours to handle the case, the accounts are already empty. I am not sure, but maybe some Brazilians can confirm if my story is impossible or not. I am not from there. I just saw it happening and people explained me that the money was gone forever. I am definitely not confusing PIX for some kind of crypto transfer.
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.
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.
The SMS option is mainly to avoid requiring a smartphone. There is a huge population that do not have a smartphone.
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.
Leading me to suspect that they're paying 3%+ to Visa/MC. And that the benefits of cashless are nowhere near what its proponents claim.
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.
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.
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.
https://youtu.be/vcG_Pmt_Ny4?si=KbAxOSFSjoPT3vK_
I could be wrong.
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?"
To put it in context: everyone with a Brazilian bank account can use Pix. That's the reason "everyone" has it.
I sometimes do wonder if these Goverment can work together on a single payment system, federally operated but connected.
I don't even remember how we used to split bills back in the day anymore.
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.
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.
Even the dullest and most unimaginative civil servant / tax office employee / security or police member must have wet dreams imagining all the possibilities...
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.
Couldn't be more glad that Trump is unknowingly bringing down that hegemony and freeing us from the arm twisting USA.
Brazil's Homegrown Payment System Is Target of Trump Admin https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/world/americas/brazil-dig...
This idea that all they do should be de facto standard for the whole world is so démodé.
Visa and Mastercard are very much against FedNow becoming widely used, as it would destroy their business.
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.
LOL!
But it doesn't use any distributed proof-of-work/stake stuff.
If you mean on the globally replicated and stored forever blockchain, I think it's 50/s or something like that.
Pix achieves literally a thousand times that.