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Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

economist.com

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Re: Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

#141

Post by afarah1 »

xinayder wrote: post #124
afarah1 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp Pay is available today in Brazil. The official reason for blocking the launch was missing paperwork, but word on the street at the time was that it was to favor Pix. This is all mentioned in the Retuers article. The reasons for favoring Pix are left for one to speculate. You say national security, the other says financial surveillance and control over the population. Time will tell.

I'd much rather let the Central Bank handle my instant payments, than Meta.

So do most Brazilians, as today that choice is available. It's interesting how being the first to launch contributed to that preference, regardless of the widespread usage of WhatsApp. There are other interesting factors to consider. For example, a lot of people had WhatsApp but no bank account. As mentioned in The Economist's article there have been changes to the banking sector brought by Pix as well. Anyway, an interesting case study, and that's why I mentioned it.

Re: Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

#142

Post by rpgbr »

earnesti wrote: post #62
SwiftyBug wrote: post #8

I've been living in Brazil for the last 20 years. Pix revolutionised the way we transact in Brazil. I've used Pix to pay for things that cost only cents, and I have a friend who bought her house using Pix. The system just works for any transfer amount. And it's so easy to use. Its speed is truly baffling, and so is its reliability. Never have I failed to make a Pix payment because of downtime. I never cease to be ama…

Can you elaborate on the technicals? Is it a phone app? Does it work through QR codes or NFC? Is there a Pix "card"?

It's a framework laid out by Central Bank and mandatory for medium and large-sized banks and payment companies. (For small ones, it's optional.)

Pix has several rules that makes up for a nice UX, such as being free for personal use and a 10-second limit to get a response after a transaction.

Pix is an open source specification, btw: https://github.com/bacen/pix-api

Re: Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

#143

Post by yetihehe »

pjc50 wrote: post #113
seszett wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parking ticket machine might make things deliberately slow because the printer needs to warm up or something. Maybe it needs up to 5 seconds to warm up if it's in deep sleep, so splitting this into three 2s periods provides the least frustrating user experience. As soon as you need to deal with real hardware things always start to get complicated.

More likely it's warming up the mobile comms state machine, without checking if it's actually needed. Unlike mobile phones which try to keep their data connection somewhat live, IoT things often drop back to the lowest state to save power (and possibly SIM cost) https://www.sharetechnote.com/html/Handbook_UMTS_RrcStateCha...

More likely it was written by some cheap interns and requires getting unique ticket id from server for "controlling" purposes. Then there is one part time employee (met him, small talked a little) who goes from car to car with terminal and checks if those tickets are valid. I have some experience with gprs systems here, so probable flow:

- press button

- gprs roundtrip about button press with "no payment, free ticket" (2s)

- machine shows "printing ticket", asks server what to print (aka the idiotic unnecessary step)

- gprs roundtrip (2s)

- printer warmup? (?s)

- prints ticket

> to save power (and possibly SIM cost)

Nope, costs per sim are monthly per card, until you hit the data limit, then per MB. Those machines typically have enough power to keep connection alive.

Re: Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

#144

Post by rpgbr »

souenzzo wrote: post #56
augusto-moura wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brazilian Pix is free though, at least for the time being. IMO the biggest thing is not the money behind it, but the ability to track individual payments. Even that, I prefer the government to have that information, than some shady owner of a private company

PIX are free for persons. Companies may* pay for pix services. My bank (that is not a good bank) charges a fixed amount of 4 BRL (aprox 1 USD) per transaction (to send PIX. not to receive) PIX in "maquininhas" may cost ~1% to the seller. * may: banks are allowed to charge.

Which is way cheaper than credit/debit card charges from Visa and Mastercard.

Re: Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

#145

Post by guax »

lukev wrote: post #129

Pix is super interesting. I have two questions to which Google wasn't able to provide quick answers: 1. Is there an easy way for a US resident to sign up for a Pix-enabled account (e.g. at a Brazilian bank?) 2. Can Pix be used easily for online payments? If both are true, it seems like it could be used as a drop-in replacement to crypto for small-value transactions which are currently infeasible in the US due to tran…

1. Yes and No. I assume Wise or another will offer this at some point with better conditions. A vendor called recarga pay offer this already but charges 4% on transactions. 2. yes, and it is used a lot.

Re: Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

#146

Post by xinayder »

DanielHB wrote: post #111
trollbridge wrote: post #10

Standard workflow in Brazil: - You need to buy something from person XZ, whether an individual, small business, or huge business. - XZ sends you an invoice (including relevant taxes). - You pay the invoice. XZ knows you’ve paid. - At year end you can download all your invoices, including any taxes already paid, for doing your taxes. (Brazil taxes make American taxation look simple.) Standard workflow in America: - “D…

- At year end you can download all your invoices, including any taxes already paid, for doing your taxes. (Brazil taxes make American taxation look simple.) I disagree, although it is VERY complex the US system is much worse. At least the Brazillian one you don't need to pay for an application (TurboTax & similars) to file your taxes.

And the Receita (IRS) app has an option to pre-fill the tax declaration form, which works wonders most of the times. It requires a manual review to certify that everything is correct, but from the times I had to declare my taxes (I'm living abroad so I don't have to do it anymore), it was as easy as loading the pre-filled details and just verifying if everything was correct.

Re: Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

#147

Post by kasey_junk »

lukev wrote: post #129

Pix is super interesting. I have two questions to which Google wasn't able to provide quick answers: 1. Is there an easy way for a US resident to sign up for a Pix-enabled account (e.g. at a Brazilian bank?) 2. Can Pix be used easily for online payments? If both are true, it seems like it could be used as a drop-in replacement to crypto for small-value transactions which are currently infeasible in the US due to tran…

My info is several years out of date so take with a grain of salt. Pix is a phenomenal in country payment system. One of a couple of the best next gen payment rails.

But its design is very much hard to work with for international transactions. It has some risk rules and design choices that make this true. I believe this is intentional as Brazil wants to maintain pretty conservative currency controls.

But! Similar things could have been said about pix and online shopping rails. It wasn’t great for that as it wasn’t the primary use case. And that is changing fast so maybe the international use case will improve.

UPI in India for instance does international work well in a similar conservative currency environment.

Re: Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

#148

Post by notpushkin »

alephnerd wrote: post #91
earnesti wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> require ID, zero privacy, usually government sanctioned > Unfortunately systems that don't have those requirements are going to be money laundering channels. I wish it wasn't such a big concern but it's unavoidable. There same requirements also make the likelihood of these systems scaling beyong one jurisdiction very unlikely. Tourists don't want to set up a payment account for every country they visit. Or other w…

> As Visa and MC work globally, I'm betting that the dominance from those will continue. China, India, Brazil, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and others are all trying to expand their own transaction networks. While it's still piecemeal, a Chinese or Indian tourist in Thailand can use UnionPay or UPI to transact without using Visa/Mastercard, a Russian tourist in Vietnam can use Mir, a Brazilian in Argentina can use Pix…

> a Russian tourist in Vietnam can use Mir

If you can find a place that actually accepts it! It’s certainly not as ubiquitous as the local Napas247 QR codes.

Re: Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

#149

Post by accurrent »

SwiftyBug wrote: post #8

I've been living in Brazil for the last 20 years. Pix revolutionised the way we transact in Brazil. I've used Pix to pay for things that cost only cents, and I have a friend who bought her house using Pix. The system just works for any transfer amount. And it's so easy to use. Its speed is truly baffling, and so is its reliability. Never have I failed to make a Pix payment because of downtime. I never cease to be ama…

While I agree cryptocurrencies don't stand a chance, my experience with qr systems has been a mixed bag. The country I live in has a fairly good qr code payment system. But there was one day when the largest bank went down and that was chaos (cash very much has a role to play). We also supposedly have linkage with India's UPI. Unfortunately, it was impossible for me to actually use that linkage thanks to the way upi works (I think only some subset of banks are supported).

Re: Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

#150

Post by graemep »

Y_Y wrote: post #83
graemep wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All Eurozone countries, all bu one an EU member (and that one is very small has a very close trade deal with the EU) so not really cross border except from a certain legalistic angle. The practicalities are very different from transferring between say Brazil and the US.

> so not really cross border except from a certain legalistic angle Is this a joke? Of course it's cross-border, it crosses international borders. It works because the countries involved put in the work to make it easy. The fact that you can't use Pix in the US has no bearing.

> The fact that you can't use Pix in the US has no bearing.

The comment I replied to was claiming Bizum operating "cross border" showed that Pix could do so, so it is very much relevant in context.

It is a very special case of cross border. It is technically cross border but does not have the difficulties of cross border in all of the rest of the world outside the EU.

In any case it is arguable whether these are separate countries or just states of the EU. It has a common currency, a parliament that can legislate (in certain matters - rather like the US Congress) for the whole EU, courts, a central bank, a public prosecutor and many other "national" institutions etc. it also have the symbols of a state such as a flag and a national anthem (albeit both shared with the Council of Europe), EU passports state they are EU as well as the issuing country's name etc.

Even if you do regard it as a cross border one it is very much atypical and cannot be replicated elsewhere.

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