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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

#591

Post by scott_w »

WinstonSmith84 wrote: post #363
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…

> Cryptocurrencies don't stand a chance. Now, try to use Pix outside of Brazil - it's not even used in other Mercosur countries, what's the chance of having that adopted in other countries... And, that's problem #1. How much do you trust your government with your money? A system like Pix don't stand a chance to get a worldwide adoption - maybe people are naive but governments won't unify to adopt a common system cont…

> How much do you trust your government with your money?

If you’re not able to trust the government to not steal your money then I suspect you have bigger problems and should look to claim asylum elsewhere.

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

#592

Post by fruit2020 »

xeromal wrote: post #541
irjustin wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how they all work including western union. It's not a secret but it's not really talked about either. No one pays FX fees on each transfer. Single large rebalancing transfers allows them to actually move money at optimal times and rates with bulk discounts. Then they can currency hedge and get larger spreads on the actual fx rate.

Kind of a tangent but I have some friends that are kurdish and that's how they transfer money to and fro the US and skirting whatever limits/regulations exist. They just give money to a money family in kurdistan and the money family here in the US hands it to them out of a restaurant or whatever. I've been fascinated with it since I knew it existed. It's all the same stuff with various coats of lipstick.

Don’t they need to pay for the plane ticket?

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

#593

Post by always_imposter »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #483
toomuchtodo wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

80 countries have instant/real time payment systems today [1], and the Bank for International Settlements is working on cross border interoperability [2]. Cryptocurrencies will likely never go away, and will remain in use for certain use cases from a cross border value transfer perspective, similar to gold; either the token moves or the ownership is updated. More interesting is offering digital wallets for a single o…

On top of that, the BIS isnt even needed for global real time payments. A company like Wise (formerly transferwise) or any similar entity can just hold accounts in each country and if the local settlement is real time they can also do real time global settlement by just updating their db and sending the money real time in the receiving location.

[dead]

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

#594

Post by seydor »

hocuspocus wrote: post #493
seydor wrote: post #444

.. meanwhile, the EU has been discussing about the Digital Euro for like 5 years

Pix isn't a CBDC. The deployment of SCT inst is mostly complete and Wero (EPI) was launched in 3 countries already. Things take a bit more time when you need to push standards and regulations to 11/27/36 countries. Overall banking and payments in the EU/EEA are pretty advanced and evolving at a decent pace given the market size and number of entities involved, the PSD is world-class.

but time is everything. Those are not consumer-facing solutions. Meanwhile everyone around me uses Revolut (a UK company)

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

#595

Post by ljf »

fruit2020 wrote: post #592
xeromal wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of a tangent but I have some friends that are kurdish and that's how they transfer money to and fro the US and skirting whatever limits/regulations exist. They just give money to a money family in kurdistan and the money family here in the US hands it to them out of a restaurant or whatever. I've been fascinated with it since I knew it existed. It's all the same stuff with various coats of lipstick.

Don’t they need to pay for the plane ticket?

No they mean that a family member in the US gives them some of their own money, but records it to a family ledger. At some other point funds or value will be transferred, but it isn't transferred within the family for every payment.

Similar to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala

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

#596

Post by seydor »

c7b wrote: post #482
seanalltogether wrote: post #4

Given the fact that the central government uses taxes to fund the creation and managements of a countries currency, it makes perfect sense that in the digital age it should also be funding the infrastructure to send digital transactions with that currency. I wonder how differently the internet would have developed if microtransations were free and easy to transfer.

> Given the fact that the central government uses taxes to fund the creation and managements of a countries currency That's not a fact, in fact it's typically the other way round, issuing a currency is generally profitable and the profits typically flow into the general government budget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage It's managed by the central bank, though, btw, which is considered separate from the gov…

they do physically print the money (at some cost) . And they can easily generate revenue from a payments system, if they want to (which they will at some point, of course)

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

#597

Post by girvo »

koyote wrote: post #537
pjc50 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> payM in the UK (which got shut down a couple of years ago due to lack of use) I'd never even heard of this! Certainly never seen anyone offering it. Guess it got run over by lack of state capacity during Brexit etc. > paying businesses vs using a card or your phone to tap and pay These schemes (izettle etc) have higher costs. The poorer the country the more significant a low-cost business TX option is.

I remember most banks having it when it first came out, I used it a couple of times to pay friends but few people knew about it. It was pretty simple and worked well, especially compared to having to give bank account details. That being said, I am in Australia now which has a similar system and I'd say 95% of my friends just give me the bank details instead of saying 'just use PayId with my phone number'.

All my friends just use PayID/phone number or email instead of the bank deets.

The big benefit is really Osko internally, which is what makes the payment instant (except for stupid CommBank)

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

#598

Post by rebanevapustus »

anodari wrote: post #485
rebanevapustus wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Brazilian government is a *very* corrupt authoritarian oligarchy. I would take any US company over that any day.

Where did you get this idea of a 'very corrupt authoritarian oligarchy'? Brazil is not much different from any other democracy and is far less oligarchic than Trump's USA. Also, PIX is managed by our independent central bank."

There is no independent component of a country. It is very naive to claim so.

https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/politica/por-decisao-de-moraes-...

What kind of non-authoritarian country arrests people for merely cursing at politicians on twitter?

Moreover, what kind of non-authoritarian country issues hundreds of thousands of rulings by its Supreme Court?

The Brazilian Supreme Court is an unelected entity that has complete control over the country, and firmly issues unappealable censorship arrests.

There is absolutely nothing this tyrannical in almost any western democracy, sans the UK.

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

#599

Post by mmooss »

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…

Are you worried about the power the central bank has?

What if they deny service to or apprehend the assets of people they politically dislike? Also couldn't they crush any hope of anyone's profitable business? Could a person or business function without it? What about in ten years?

What if they track people by their transaction and built profiles of them? They could essentially make it too dangerous to do business to people who are disliked.

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

#600

Post by Voultapher »

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.

To give some reference, using stripe you pay 2-3% for credit card payments and PayPal charges you ~5% of the transaction amount. Apple store and Steam take 30%. So honestly 1% sounds like a great deal.
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