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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Whenever people start arguing about inefficient government they should be reminded that pix costs like 10M USD a year to run. An absolute bargain for what it delivers.
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.
> a group of people impose a 1-3% tax on their population.
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.
Most countries have some kind of bank wire system that is in charge of the money itself. Cards are pre-authorization system. The movement of money is authorized when you swipe the card, but not actually moved until up to a few days later, through the existing bank wire systems. If there's a currency conversion involved it can be even trickier.
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:
Wero sounds similar to the US Zelle system but the big reason for that to exist in the first place is that bank account numbers are not safe to share in the US since they can be used to pull payments so there was never an option for easily transferring money to friends and family other than writing a cheque.
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.
To be pedantic, IBAN isn't a payment system, but only an identifier. It's like an IP address - you still need to enlist the services of an ISP to reach it, and that ISP has to find an actual route and send packets over actual cables.
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.
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.
My understanding is that FedNow could become something like Pix, but implementation is voluntary. In Brazil, the central bank required all retail banks of significance to implement Pix by a certain deadline.
Visa and Mastercard are very much against FedNow becoming widely used, as it would destroy their business.
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
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?
The army of middlemen with their hands out is the worst part, where you also have fees paid to the merchant bank, the iso/payment service provider, and a chain of agents. In disfavored industries like adult content, this can reach 15% or more, plus thousands in annual "high risk" fees (even if chargeback rate is good). It's a huge anticompetitive racket, and the sooner US can shake off Visa/MasterCard, the better off we'll be.
EU regulations limit those interchange fees to 0.2% for debit card transactions and 0.3% for credit card transactions so total costs are much lower for businesses. Cards have replaced cash even for small transactions in most European countries.
The banks and the payment processors are the real customers of the payment networks and they all do better when they can squeeze more money from the end users - the cardholders and the businesses. Pix cuts out these middlemen and that’s an existential threat to their business model, ergo an “investigation” by the Trump admin.
All should be free. Imagine if government decided to impose 3% revenue tax, yet these companies get a free pass.
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.
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.
PSD2 is merely a framework for an uniform access to banking, same APIs everywhere. While you can send money through it, it's still through the same means as normal.
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.
Exactly and if you think 2-3% is a small number you should keep in mind that that is effectively half of what the market returns over the long-term at 7%.
Pix is for domestic use right? So tourists who come to Brazil still use Visa and Mastercard as well as Brazilian tourists who travel abroad. Visa and Mastercard are companies of the past, crypto and stablecoins will destroy them sooner or later.
It's just buzzwordy bullshit. The European system is just a classic credit/debit system. The Chinese system is a bit more sophisticated, with offline capability and smart contracts.
But it doesn't use any distributed proof-of-work/stake stuff.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
This is a free market. All he has to do is offer a better service than the public offering.
I always hear that the government is inefficient, should be easy no?
Whenever people start arguing about inefficient government they should be reminded that pix costs like 10M USD a year to run. An absolute bargain for what it delivers.
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.
> a group of people impose a 1-3% tax on their population.
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.
Competition is for losers. - Peter Thiel
Most countries have some kind of bank wire system that is in charge of the money itself. Cards are pre-authorization system. The movement of money is authorized when you swipe the card, but not actually moved until up to a few days later, through the existing bank wire systems. If there's a currency conversion involved it can be even trickier.
Banks are private companies. The Federal Reserve is partially private.
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.
Wero sounds similar to the US Zelle system but the big reason for that to exist in the first place is that bank account numbers are not safe to share in the US since they can be used to pull payments so there was never an option for easily transferring money to friends and family other than writing a cheque.
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 the biggest reason is sovereignty: we cannot risk US cutting our payment system if they for example don't give Greenland for them.
I think this is the biggest reason to ensure you can pay with a local system in shops and restaurants.
To be pedantic, IBAN isn't a payment system, but only an identifier. It's like an IP address - you still need to enlist the services of an ISP to reach it, and that ISP has to find an actual route and send packets over actual cables.
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.
Hey Visa/Mastercard — try that move in China and see how well it turns out.
Happens all the time: https://ustr.gov/search?q=initiates+section+301+investigatio...
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.
My understanding is that FedNow could become something like Pix, but implementation is voluntary. In Brazil, the central bank required all retail banks of significance to implement Pix by a certain deadline.
Visa and Mastercard are very much against FedNow becoming widely used, as it would destroy their business.
For what MAGA views as good for the USA is actually deplorable loss for the civilized world.
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
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?
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/12/amer...
Despite what the White House thinks American companies are not owed a business model.
...unless they generously grease the right palms, or push the right "us vs. them" buttons.
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's interesting that we live in 2026 and people still don't understand the fees of credit card processing.
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
The army of middlemen with their hands out is the worst part, where you also have fees paid to the merchant bank, the iso/payment service provider, and a chain of agents. In disfavored industries like adult content, this can reach 15% or more, plus thousands in annual "high risk" fees (even if chargeback rate is good). It's a huge anticompetitive racket, and the sooner US can shake off Visa/MasterCard, the better off we'll be.
EU regulations limit those interchange fees to 0.2% for debit card transactions and 0.3% for credit card transactions so total costs are much lower for businesses. Cards have replaced cash even for small transactions in most European countries.
The banks and the payment processors are the real customers of the payment networks and they all do better when they can squeeze more money from the end users - the cardholders and the businesses. Pix cuts out these middlemen and that’s an existential threat to their business model, ergo an “investigation” by the Trump admin.
All should be free. Imagine if government decided to impose 3% revenue tax, yet these companies get a free pass.
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.
Cash handling also costs businesses money so I'm not sure it needs to be free, just strictly regulated.
> Why would you let America take 2-3% of your transaction volumes?
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.
Still greater than 0.
There's absolutely no reason for a country to outsource paynent infrastructure to US corporations.
> You could, in theory, use the VISA network and not pay those fees to a card issuer.
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.
> Every country should have this
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.
I misunderstood, psd2 is Europe's equivalent.
And yes, every country should have this. Even America
PSD2 is merely a framework for an uniform access to banking, same APIs everywhere. While you can send money through it, it's still through the same means as normal.
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.
There are plans for interoperability between the various European payment apps.
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)
Wero is the alternative, it's moving on quite well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment)
> Why would you let America take 2-3% of your transaction volumes?
And spy on every single transaction
Exactly and if you think 2-3% is a small number you should keep in mind that that is effectively half of what the market returns over the long-term at 7%.
It made sense back in the 1970s when it was hard for an American to pay for a hotel room in Manilla.
But in 2026 data moves in a micro second from one continent to another.
In India there is 'UPI' system that is similar.
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...
Pix is for domestic use right? So tourists who come to Brazil still use Visa and Mastercard as well as Brazilian tourists who travel abroad. Visa and Mastercard are companies of the past, crypto and stablecoins will destroy them sooner or later.
How many transactions can you ran per second on major coins like BTC?
No, for example Argentinian tourists use Belo[1] for paying in Brazil. No need for credit cards.
[1] https://www.belo.app/en-us/ar/
"crypto and stablecoins will destroy them sooner or later."
LOL!
I meant digital dollar and digital euro, you won't need Visa and Mastercard anymore.
Dollar is already "digital", and has been for the last 50 years or so.
I meant this https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency..., this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_euro and this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_renminbi
It's just buzzwordy bullshit. The European system is just a classic credit/debit system. The Chinese system is a bit more sophisticated, with offline capability and smart contracts.
But it doesn't use any distributed proof-of-work/stake stuff.