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.

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 am glad to see the EU following Brazil with its own payment system.

Visa/MasterCard/Paypal era is gone!!

Why not? This is such an American point of view that sounds similar to why the IRS doesn't offer easier tax filing options.

- 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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

https://wero-wallet.eu/

My bank (N26) should support this later this year. I hope it becomes as big and successful as Pix.

Even the dullest and most unimaginative civil servant / tax office employee / security or police member must have wet dreams imagining all the possibilities...

I sometimes do wonder if these Goverment can work together on a single payment system, federally operated but connected.

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?"

I don't even remember how we used to split bills back in the day anymore.

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 ...

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.

Couldn't be more glad that Trump is unknowingly bringing down that hegemony and freeing us from the arm twisting USA.

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.

This idea that all they do should be de facto standard for the whole world is so démodé.

Brazil's Homegrown Payment System Is Target of Trump Admin https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/world/americas/brazil-dig...