- 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.
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.
I sometimes do wonder if these Goverment can work together on a single payment system, federally operated but connected.
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.
Brazil's Homegrown Payment System Is Target of Trump Admin https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/world/americas/brazil-dig...
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'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.
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...
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 am glad to see the EU following Brazil with its own payment system.
Visa/MasterCard/Paypal era is gone!!
My bank (N26) should support this later this year. I hope it becomes as big and successful as Pix.
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.
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 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?"
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.
This idea that all they do should be de facto standard for the whole world is so démodé.
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 ...
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is no explicit need for AWS in this. But it was probably easier to build since it is what we are used to.
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.
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 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".
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.
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.
[1] https://www.dbs.com.sg/personal/deposits/pay-with-ease/payno...
I always hear that the government is inefficient, should be easy no?
Not defending credit card companies, just pointing out the fact that there are risks associated with pix that must be considered.
Americans will be "pro free market" until it's somebody else doing the competition, then they will be very butthurt about it (at best)
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.
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.
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.
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!).
The SMS option is mainly to avoid requiring a smartphone. There is a huge population that do not have a smartphone.
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
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 :)
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
All financial institutions are surveilled and regulated. There's a reason Patio 11 describe the industry as an "arm of the government".
But furthermore, his argument is not about surveillance (which he accepts when he describes the central bank as the regulator) but about the competition.
It's the very idea of something being provided as a public good that is considered "anormal" and "anti-competitive" here.
Visa and Mastercard are 300% surveilled: once by the Brazilian government, once by the payment providers themselves, and then finally by the American government.
There are privacy implications of cashless societies, but these foreign companies are worse in every aspect.
I think this is the biggest reason to ensure you can pay with a local system in shops and restaurants.
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.
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"
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.
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
And Visa and MasterCard aren't surveiled? Isn't one of their selling points that they surveil every transaction and automatically block anything suspicious? And increasingly, the parameters for suspicious include anything pornographic or even 'pornographic' (see: the bullying of steam to remove explicit games).
At least with Pix, the costs get lower for the end users.
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 shocks me how well it works sometimes. Literally press pay and move eyeballs to notifications and it's there already.
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.
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.
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.
And remember that credit card fees are greater in Brazil
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
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.
Most people don't experience the full scope of Pix which is impressive.
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.
And yes, every country should have this. Even America
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Initiative
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Alliance
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.
> And Visa and MasterCard aren't surveiled?
Who is doing the surveilling is the difference. In the latter, the surveillance is done by the private sector, in aims of better targeted advertising.
In the former, it's done by either the government or by a government-tied organization, and thus invites a left-hand-passes-to-right-hand scenario, wherein the data & metadata obtained from the system could be passed to law enforcement for prosecution (doubly so if the transactions could be bundled as evidence).
> Isn't one of their selling points that they surveil every transaction and automatically block anything suspicious? And increasingly, the parameters for suspicious include anything pornographic or even 'pornographic' (see: the bullying of steam to remove explicit games).
The censorship pressures made onto Visa & Mastercard was done not by the government, but by PACs & non-governmental organizations. It is through the use of "think of the children" that they push them into censoring transactions, under the implicit threat that lawsuits will be filed if such transactions remain allowed.
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.
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.
In fact, the BRL amount settled via TED is still higher than Pix, although the gap seems to be closing
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)
People still increasingly pay their rent here via eInterac.
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.
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.
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...
It's like WhatsApp but with money!
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.
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.
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.
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.
The thing about US' corporate suveillance system, and why the US government is so tolerant about it, is that US government branches either buy or are given all the data they need.
You don't get government surveillance or corporate surveillance, you get government surveillance or government and corporate surveillance.
Doesn't mean they will automatically expose you, as it requires justice approval technically...
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.
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.
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)
If the e-krona happens, that would be a better comparison.
Original article: PIX: el sistema de pago brasileño presionado por Visa y Mastercard
In just over five years, Brazil has achieved what few countries have managed: establishing a digital payment system that not only competes directly with American giants Visa and Mastercard but has also surpassed them in transaction volume. However, this success has ignited a geopolitical and commercial battle that threatens to hinder this financial revolution. The administration of Donald Trump, influenced by credit card companies, has launched a commercial investigation into Pix, alleging anti-competitive practices, prompting Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to proclaim a nationwide campaign: “Pix is ours, my friend”.
El Ciudadano Team
Pix is the instant payment system developed and managed by the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB). First announced in February 2019, the system officially began operating on October 5, 2020, and became fully functional by November 16, 2020. The name is a play on words combining “Pi” (for Pagamentos Instantâneos) and “Tix” (for Transações instantâneas X), reflecting its emphasis on speed, technology, and versatility.
Pix enables real-time money transfers between bank accounts, available 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, in just seconds. Users register “Pix keys,” which can be their phone number, email, national ID number (CPF or CNPJ), or a random key generated by the system.
The process is straightforward: the payer opens their bank application, selects Pix, enters the recipient’s key or scans a QR code, confirms using biometric authentication or a PIN, and the money is transferred instantly. Both parties receive real-time confirmation. The system operates through the Instant Payments System (SPI) of the Central Bank and is available at nearly all financial institutions in the country.
For individuals, the service is completely free; for businesses, the fees are significantly lower than those of credit cards (around 0.33% compared to the typical 2-5% charged by cards).
Pix has experienced explosive growth. In 2025, the system processed R$ 35.3 trillion (approximately $6.7 trillion), marking a 33.7% increase from the R$ 26.5 trillion of the previous year. In the last year alone, nearly 80 billion transactions took place, up from over 63 billion in 2024.
From its launch until September 2025, Pix handled 196.2 billion transactions, moving $16 trillion, an amount exceeding seven times Brazil’s annual GDP in 2024.
Currently, Pix boasts over 180 million users, with 162.8 million being individuals, representing approximately 93% of Brazil’s adult population. There are more than 617 million registered accounts and over 920 million active Pix keys. In total, 930 financial institutions participate in the system.
The daily record was set on June 6, 2025, with 276 million transactions in a single day, significantly surpassing the combined transaction volume of Visa and Mastercard in Brazil. According to Central Bank data, at the beginning of 2025, Pix was managing over 224 million daily transactions, far exceeding the total of both American giants combined.
Market Evolution of Payments in Brazil (2025):
The success of Pix has not gone unnoticed by American credit card multinationals. Since 2022, Mastercard Brazil’s CEO, Marcelo Tangioni, has voiced his concerns: “Pix is great, beneficial for the industry. What’s not great is that it falls under the Central Bank. It can’t regulate and compete at the same time”.
The reason is clear: Pix has significantly eroded Visa and Mastercard’s market share in Brazil. Estimates suggest that between 2021 and 2024, the system resulted in losses nearing R$ 12 billion (approximately R$ 6.5 billion for Visa and R$ 5.3 billion for Mastercard), due to much lower fees (0.33% vs. the average 2.3% charged by cards).
In September 2025, the Trump administration openly supported Visa and Mastercard, with the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) launching a formal investigation into Pix, claiming it creates an “unfair competitive disadvantage” for U.S. firms in the sector. A White House report from April 2026 once again highlighted Pix as a “detrimental system for global credit card companies”.
The Brazilian government responded firmly. President Lula stated: “No one will make us change Pix”, and launched a social media campaign with the slogan “Pix is ours, my friend”, adopting an explicitly nationalist tone. The Brazilian Federation of Banks defended the system, arguing it follows an “open model” available to all financial entities and that, by not being a commercial product, it “promotes competition”.
Far from stagnating, the Central Bank of Brazil continues to enhance Pix’s functionalities. Recent innovations include:
The Central Bank has also strengthened security with the Special Refund Mechanism (MED) 2.0, which allows tracking funds in cases of fraud, a measure mandated since February 2026.
El Ciudadano
But it doesn't use any distributed proof-of-work/stake stuff.
What's with people complaining that they can't terminate transfers out of their accounts?
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.
How much does this matter in the context of paying in BRL, to a BRL merchant, in Brazil?