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Comment by dbolgheroni | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

It’s a distributed transaction, which is what makes it complicated. You need to atomically remove money from an account in one database and add money to an account in a totally separate database.

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).

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

> 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).

It doesn't sound like you're disputing me in any way! You're actually saying the same thing as I did. :)

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.

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-...

I am aware of that, which is why I said "kinda" but that was my first job out of uni and I didn't want to create a fuss.

> 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!

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...

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