Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard

I can see that Visa and Mastercard are freaking out, not because Pix can take over their business model, but because it can give ideas to other countries doing the same.

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.

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.

> 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”.

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

Read: The USA does not like what they cannot control!!

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

Visa/MasterCard/Paypal era is gone!!

It is delightful to see PIX's exponential growth. It was preceded by India's UPI and borrowed heavily from it Here's a paper describing the experience: https://www.braziliankeynesianreview.org/BKR/article/view/33...

It's surprising that Visa and Mastercard are even private companies. I expected that the government would be in charge of money and not let a group of people impose a 1-3% tax on their population. In the US, credit cards account for "71% of nationwide retail sales dollars".

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 is worth noting that despite all this cheap sovereignty talk from Brazil’s president, in practice Brazil would not be able to operate Pix at that scale without heavily relying on American hyperscalers companies.

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...

I guess this is largely equivalent to Qvik in Hungary.

- 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.

The Swiss nation bank and other central banks should also do something similar. They are loosing control to private foreign corporations which decide what you can and can not purchase. Not based on laws but on risk.

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.

Every country should have this.

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 ...

It would be Un-American to overlook any chance to forcibly intervene in a Latin America country for the financial benefit of a large American company...wouldn't it?

In EU we have multiple national systems, but now they are trying to unify them to the IBAN system, so you can pay in the same way by opening your bank app and scanning a QR code:

https://wero-wallet.eu/

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

Visa is trying hard to take over Japan at the moment and it's painful to watch. I'm really rooting for Pix, because the Visa MasterCard monopoly isn't doing us any favours

The only problem I actually face with Pix in Brazil is:

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.

India's UPI is also extremely quick and easy to use - instant transfers with just the person's phone number or via a QR code or via a UPI id which looks like an email id.

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.

Brazilian here! For people from other countries, I can say with 100% certainty: There's not a single chance of Brazil's Pix going away — even if a far-right government wins and aligns with the USA. Even then, it's impossible. The ONLY way this could ever happen is if the USA invades Brazil.

Seems fairly logical for any large country to create something like this. Visa/MC is nice but allows the US to apply undue pressure to individuals. E.g. the US applied financial sanctions on ICC officials in the EU resulting in them losing access to Visa/MC credit cards and banks even those are that are purely EU based.

Despite what the White House thinks American companies are not owed a business model.

I have a credit card from BB, and I also use pix from time to time but not as much as a credit card. When Uncle Sam started bullying PIX I did what I never thought I would actually do. Since I can't stop using credit card (because it's helpful in my life) I canceled my Visa card with BB and requested ELO cc, created in 2011 by Bradesco, Banco do Brasil, and Caixa, not regretting anything. Blowing out someone else’s candle doesn’t make yours shine any brighter.

Brazil can do this. Why can't we?

Hey Visa/Mastercard — try that move in China and see how well it turns out.

I've been living abroad for over a decade now, so I never got to experience Pix.

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?"

It's baffling to me how the US thinks they are entitled to anything related to this. Calling Visa and Mastercard global credit companies is a stretch, they're clearly American monopolies.

There is also UPI in India, and I assume something coming soon from China.

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

The main issue in this market is that the consumer doesn’t pay the cost of the transaction, therefore there is no pressure to reduce costs, and hence no innovation. All of this could be solved if a government regulated that consumers must pay the fee. Here, in the UK, we have obviously regulated the exact opposite of a sensible regulation and were “shocked” when total fees paid on transactions exploded.

In India there is 'UPI' system that is similar.

Visa and MC definitely use their consumer features (subsidized by merchants) to help maintain the duopoly, and a huge one is global acceptance. Does something like Pix require a strong, trustworthy central bank, and can it work outside of your home country? Or do even modern banking countries run into the LCD issue with international settlement?

Pix is a great alternative for cash but a poor alternative for credit card. The safety is abysmal IMHO.

TIL that there are fees for Pix under certain circumstances (e.g. as a business receiving payments). I mostly use Pix for person-to-person transactions, and those are free (and instantaneous).

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

Heh, Lula has a just slight lead on the elections this year.

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.

I am Brazilian and I can tell PIX is the future of transactions. It's free (until now), fast and easy. All the world should adept it, plus with bitcoin at my opinion

Philippines has QR/Instapay. Not sure if it's complete equivalent of PIX. But basically you can scan a QR code and you can pay using any bank or digital wallet.

When ever I visit Brazil now I feel very left out for not having Pix! I wanna join the electronic cash club. Don't think it's possible for foreigners tho

If there is a company in New Zealand working on a similar system, I'd love to hear about it because I would like to work for you.

a question for Ukrainians who maybe rode to Brazil and got to try Pix: is it this fast? is monobank faster or slower than Pix?

Looking forward to a European-wide payment system. Sure, there are apps probably in each individual country that you can use to pay (via a QR code) or easily transfer money (usually using a phone number). But there are cases like renting a car or paying abroad which are not covered. Seems a bit crazy considering this is a common market. Why don't these apps look to expand more aggresively in the EU? I know there's Wero, but why aren't they more bald in their approach? I also know there's the digital euro promoted by the European Commission, but I'm not holding my breath for that. It takes way too long and my feeling is that it is being used mostly to pressure the US. I don't think we'll be able to use it anytime soon.

I´m always baffled by the fact that PIX discussions (almost?) never address issues of privacy: the whole system is offered (and run) by the Brazilian central bank. Due to its popularity here, the central bank has enormous, detailed and live insight into a citizen´s financial life.

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

Visa and Mastercard are just secret services of the USA by now.

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

Some coverage from September:

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

How difficult is for USA administration learn good practices and initiatives and think into implementing those? And also, why Master and Visa haven’t came with a solution where they integrate with all of that and innovate?

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