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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
Considering the times we're living in, each country should consider implementing own payment system, and never abandoning cash for digital currency. Both systems should coexist and complement each other but we aren't living in a perfect world.
> 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.
He's got a point though. Pix is a revolutionary system, but it is also a deeply centralized system, at the hands of the brazilian government no less. Pix is already 100% surveilled. With the widespread adoption of pix by the public, some nightmarish scenarios have entered the realm of possibility. I've seen law proposals to criminalize possession of physical cash.
Not defending credit card companies, just pointing out the fact that there are risks associated with pix that must be considered.
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.
Visa/Mastercard are also 100% surveilled. The nightmare of your transactions being monitored and arbitrarily blocked that's peddled as an argument against CBDCs or public financial infrastructure like Pix is already a reality for all of traditional finance (with the exception of physical cash, which happens to also be a central bank product). Sometimes even balances get confiscated, read the horror stories by Stripe customers. Americans seem to believe that the same thing is necessarily worse if it's done in the public sector. Other countries tend to see it differently. Just let them be.
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.
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.
As long as the foreign companies operate within the country under the country's laws, it shouldn't be a big problem. But being dependent on only one vendor and not having redundancy in the system is a problem though. This is why cash is important to provide the ultimate redundancy against all technological and infrastructural failures.
Don't get me wrong. But mentioning Brazil's president on this meter just adds even more politics to the discussion. Which global systems don't depend somehow on US infrastructure?
Do you have the same opinion about the European leaders that are creating/created cloud infrastructure?
I believe just one of the parts is really into adversarial talks lately. Brazil is just following what other countries are also doing.
> But mentioning Brazil's president on this meter just adds even more politics to the discussion.
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
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.
I can see the usability aspect, but using an insecure protocol like SMS for something like payment sounds like an absolutely awful idea.
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.
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
Visa and MasterCard are basically redundant except for international transactions. We already mostly use QR code payments, which is a semi-open standard and somewhat vendor agnostic(with caveats). It works internationally.
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"
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's surprising that Visa and Mastercard are even private companies.
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 is not only "their" population. Mastercard and Visa captures a % of each sale done globally with their cards. It is perfectly reasonable for all countries to want to develop their own payment systems and stop paying taxes to the USA.
> 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.
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.
Isn't US EBT card on the same payment network as credit cards? That doesn't count as an independent system. The same set of "they" as Visa/Mastercard gets the fee.
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.
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 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.
Sharing banking information is not safe in Europe, decades ago a phone scammer convinced me to give them my information and they were able to pull money from my account without any permission from me whatsoever, they just acted like I already signed up to their scam service when I never did. That was a completely foreign and insane idea to me (and it is still insane and should not be allowed) that someone can simply withdraw money from my account. They sent me some contract in the mail that I had to apparently reject and otherwise it was automatically approved. Which itself is surely also not legal but the point is that they were able to take money from my account just with my information.
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.
Wero is just another private company trying get their cut of payment fees. You can do the same thing with SEPA Instant Payment (or some member states outside of the Eurozone have their own similar thing).
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".
Wero does several things. You can already send instant payments if you fill out IBAN and such, but entering order numbers, account references, and other such cruft for purchasing products is a pain. Companies receiving such payments also need to connect payment to a user and update their digital processes somehow. Wero offers such a solution so you don't have to find a PSD2 processor (which will probably cost just as much).
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!).
wero is a european initiative set up by a consortium of banks that is built layered upon instant payments. it's not a private company like paypal or visa, its an attempt at making European payment infrastructure
I couldn't have said it better. I don't understand what they solve.
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.
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.
Most likely because your country's banks are heavily lobbying against such initiatives.
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.
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.
QR payments are ubiquitous in South East Asia. The eventual goal is ASEAN-wide interoperability, and some are even already interoperable with South Korean, Japanese and Chinese counterparts. And as expected, the US is also complaining about those, merely because Americans can't grasp the concept, like how they lag on pin adoption.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
Add an extra fixed fee if you need 3D Secure (and equivalents). This should be covered already by the assessment and interchange fees to begin with.
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.
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%.
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.
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
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.
>And also, why Master and Visa haven’t came with a solution where they integrate with all of that and innovate?
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.
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.
Cross border payment with QR codes are already a thing in plenty of Southeast and East Asian countries. Crypto and stablecoins aren't needed (nor wanted, due to money laundering risks).
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.
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).
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Would you say that Pix is comparable to Canada's Interac Debit?
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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.
Pix is ok - but it’s clunky to use and has a single point of failure.
On the former - paying is:
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.
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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
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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
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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.
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.
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...
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!!
Considering the times we're living in, each country should consider implementing own payment system, and never abandoning cash for digital currency. Both systems should coexist and complement each other but we aren't living in a perfect world.
Yup
Americans will be "pro free market" until it's somebody else doing the competition, then they will be very butthurt about it (at best)
Bullies don't like to be bullied, ahhhh the double standards haha
> 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.
He's got a point though. Pix is a revolutionary system, but it is also a deeply centralized system, at the hands of the brazilian government no less. Pix is already 100% surveilled. With the widespread adoption of pix by the public, some nightmarish scenarios have entered the realm of possibility. I've seen law proposals to criminalize possession of physical cash.
Not defending credit card companies, just pointing out the fact that there are risks associated with pix that must be considered.
> Pix is already 100% surveilled
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.
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Visa/Mastercard are also 100% surveilled. The nightmare of your transactions being monitored and arbitrarily blocked that's peddled as an argument against CBDCs or public financial infrastructure like Pix is already a reality for all of traditional finance (with the exception of physical cash, which happens to also be a central bank product). Sometimes even balances get confiscated, read the horror stories by Stripe customers. Americans seem to believe that the same thing is necessarily worse if it's done in the public sector. Other countries tend to see it differently. Just let them be.
> Pix is already 100% surveilled
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.
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...
As long as the foreign companies operate within the country under the country's laws, it shouldn't be a big problem. But being dependent on only one vendor and not having redundancy in the system is a problem though. This is why cash is important to provide the ultimate redundancy against all technological and infrastructural failures.
Only reinforces the point that relying on american infrastructure as a critical piece of your stack, in 2026, is a liability.
This is not a real problem outside of niche industries
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
Don't get me wrong. But mentioning Brazil's president on this meter just adds even more politics to the discussion. Which global systems don't depend somehow on US infrastructure? Do you have the same opinion about the European leaders that are creating/created cloud infrastructure? I believe just one of the parts is really into adversarial talks lately. Brazil is just following what other countries are also doing.
> But mentioning Brazil's president on this meter just adds even more politics to the discussion.
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
So they get to decide when a transaction is in their national interest and do business on that basis?
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.
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.
In some setups UPI doesn't even internet! Just an SMS is sufficient
I can see the usability aspect, but using an insecure protocol like SMS for something like payment sounds like an absolutely awful idea.
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.
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
Could you elaborate? Genuinely interested.
Visa and MasterCard are basically redundant except for international transactions. We already mostly use QR code payments, which is a semi-open standard and somewhat vendor agnostic(with caveats). It works internationally.
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"
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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's surprising that Visa and Mastercard are even private companies.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2rKS4l6MAk
It is not only "their" population. Mastercard and Visa captures a % of each sale done globally with their cards. It is perfectly reasonable for all countries to want to develop their own payment systems and stop paying taxes to the USA.
> 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
The US already has a competing payment system for benefits (EBT cards), as do many other countries.
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.
The hardest part is network effects.
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.
Isn't US EBT card on the same payment network as credit cards? That doesn't count as an independent system. The same set of "they" as Visa/Mastercard gets the fee.
The US is controlled by finance capital, the elections are just to choose it's spokesperson.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sharing banking information is not safe in Europe, decades ago a phone scammer convinced me to give them my information and they were able to pull money from my account without any permission from me whatsoever, they just acted like I already signed up to their scam service when I never did. That was a completely foreign and insane idea to me (and it is still insane and should not be allowed) that someone can simply withdraw money from my account. They sent me some contract in the mail that I had to apparently reject and otherwise it was automatically approved. Which itself is surely also not legal but the point is that they were able to take money from my account just with my information.
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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.
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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.
Wero is just another private company trying get their cut of payment fees. You can do the same thing with SEPA Instant Payment (or some member states outside of the Eurozone have their own similar thing).
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".
Wero does several things. You can already send instant payments if you fill out IBAN and such, but entering order numbers, account references, and other such cruft for purchasing products is a pain. Companies receiving such payments also need to connect payment to a user and update their digital processes somehow. Wero offers such a solution so you don't have to find a PSD2 processor (which will probably cost just as much).
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!).
wero is a european initiative set up by a consortium of banks that is built layered upon instant payments. it's not a private company like paypal or visa, its an attempt at making European payment infrastructure
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I couldn't have said it better. I don't understand what they solve.
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.
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.
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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?
They're not really comparable because Pix is interbank while monobank in Ukraine is a single bank.
Brazil can do this. Why can't we?
Most likely because your country's banks are heavily lobbying against such initiatives.
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.
The EU is literally working on an alternative as we speak: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...
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.
Vietnam has a system like this too, QR based and free. India has UPI.
QR payments are ubiquitous in South East Asia. The eventual goal is ASEAN-wide interoperability, and some are even already interoperable with South Korean, Japanese and Chinese counterparts. And as expected, the US is also complaining about those, merely because Americans can't grasp the concept, like how they lag on pin adoption.
who are we?
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.
Reminder: always travel with a spare phone with a broken screen just in case.
Duopolists whining about competition eh?
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...
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?"
had the same experience.. "how come you dont have Pix?"
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.
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.
Add an extra fixed fee if you need 3D Secure (and equivalents). This should be covered already by the assessment and interchange fees to begin with.
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.
Any percentage based fee for processing a transaction is borderline criminal.
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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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.
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 should be possible, they issue CPF numbers even for tourists if you want.
Problem is you need a Brazilian bank account... Opening a foreign bank account creates tax nightmares.
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In India there is 'UPI' system that is similar.
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.
>And also, why Master and Visa haven’t came with a solution where they integrate with all of that and innovate?
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.
For what MAGA views as good for the USA is actually deplorable loss for the civilized world.
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...
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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.
Cross border payment with QR codes are already a thing in plenty of Southeast and East Asian countries. Crypto and stablecoins aren't needed (nor wanted, due to money laundering risks).
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.
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