Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

721–730 of 789 posts

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

#721

Post by lucasoshiro »

HeavyStorm wrote: post #660

I've worked with banking tech for almost 20 years in Brazil. The Pix system is great, but before that we already had TED which was slower but very reliable (the main downside is that it that it closes outside commercial hours for post processing). There are a lot of a lot of other things like Boleto (which are use for billing) and more recently the "Open Finance" system which allows different institutions to share cu…

> poor country like Brazil

You can say several bad things about Brazil, but it being poor is not one of them.

> The reason?

A friend that worked in banks in Brazil and Canada thinks that it may be because Brazilian banks went digital later, so it was easier to implement more modern features.

This is, banks that went digital earlier stuck with older technologies because them just worked.

In the opposite way: Japan. It was a futuristic country in the past but now they still use fax and recently abandoned floppy disks

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

#722

Post by reaperducer »

WinstonSmith84 wrote: post #418
reaperducer wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

try to use Pix outside of Brazil Try to use cryptocurrency for anything other than a few very specific transactions at a number of places in the world so small that it's a rounding error. Still cryptocurrencies as-is remain relevant And somehow less relevant than cash. I can take cash from any country in the world to my local bank, and deposit it into my account. I can get a dozen different foreign currencies at my l…

> I can take cash from any country in the world to my local bank, and deposit it into my account. If you are at a institution bank, probably but that's a non-existent use case - I never had Argentinian Pesos, Turkish Lira or Bulgarian Lev I suddenly needed to deposit into my bank account !.. > Try to use cryptocurrency for anything other than a few very specific transactions at a number of places in the world so smal…

I'm not sure whether you travel much, but I always travel as a digital nomad.

I was a "digital nomad" before that was even a term.

I've done "work from home" in Japan, China, Macau, South Korea, Belgium, and at least ten American cities. Even way back when we did it with payphones, Telex and fax machines.

Get off my lawn.

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

#723

Post by tim333 »

riffraff wrote: post #689
tim333 wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been with them a while also and haven't noticed a huge change apart for switching the colour from blue to green? Site from 4 years ago "The cheap, fast way to send money abroad" https://web.archive.org/web/20210305145221/https://wise.com/ vs now "Send money globally for less" wise.com

They also switched to the peculiar slanted round font ("wise sans"), and padded every page with whitespace so it has a much lower information density. The actual experience past login never had much so yeah it's not as much a change as the public branding. But mostly, it's the light-green-on-dark-green text which I dislike, and I _think_ they dialed down its usage compared to e.g. the brand announcement[0] and how th…

Oh yeah, the second one [1] is kind of ugly.

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

#724

Post by lbschenkel »

ryandrake wrote: post #51
pearlsontheroad wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brazil has an insane level of financial fraud and tax evasion. Pix mitigates some of that, but at the cost of privacy - something that Brazilians do not care too much about.

That’s a pretty sweeping generalization about 200M+ people!

But is true. I am a Brazilian who lives in Sweden and there are multiple banks here that have blank bans on transfers from/to Brazilian banks due to the amount of fraud and money laundering and lax KYC controls. It is simply too much work for the banks here to vet those transactions and they decided just to refrain from doing it.

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

#725

Post by dysoco »

senorrib wrote: post #692
alephnerd wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You can absolutely not use Pix in Argentina. Maybe some street performer will, but most places barely accept cards, let alone pix. Cash is still king there.

Where? Pretty much every place accepts Mercadopago at least in Buenos Aires and PBA. From big stores to smaller ones to street performers or small shops in the middle of the road.

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

#726

Post by jalapenos »

jalapenos wrote: post #601
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…

"Certain use cases", yes

(DRUGS)

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

#727

Post by whimsicalism »

maronato wrote: post #579
whimsicalism wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

actually, foreign capital and foreign investment is good - and fair play before the law facilitates that. securitization and anti-globalization makes us all poorer, worse off, and more prone to conflict. lawfare is an addictive drug and can lead to serious outcomes, as history in Brazil shows any number of times - like even with the current president.

WhatsApp pay wouldn’t be an investment. All money made from it, directly or indirectly, would go straight to the US

that’s exactly how investments work. you build out something or fund the building out of something and then some of the returns are repatriated to the investor.

in this case, you invest in building out a compliant and easy money transfer service. in other cases, you invest in a toll road, etc. etc.

the whole point of investment is it is a win-win

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

#728

Post by Vilian »

digianarchist wrote: post #516

The EU would do well to study Pix and it's rollout as it seeks to replace US payments systems across the bloc: https://www.businesstoday.in/world/us/story/march-to-indepen...

Italy is considering implementing the mechanism https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-27/brazil-ta...

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

#729

Post by danielmarkbruce »

irjustin wrote: post #635
dguest wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this is a dumb question, but how is the "single large rebalancing transfer" accomplished? I don't know of any machine where dollars go in one side, are destroyed, and euros are created on the other side. My assumption was that it usually comes down to finding someone else with money in both currencies (i.e. a large bank or government) and exchanging one for the other. Of course that's unsatisfying: it's not jus…

> it's not just turtles all the way down If you drill far enough... well anyway > I don't know of any machine where dollars go in one side, are destroyed, and euros are created on the other side. The Treasury is the machine you're looking for. And the wire transfer, SWIFT, usually, is the tool of choice. In a sense, yes dollars are "destroyed" in that they leave that monetary system. Banks like BoA hold a few kind of…

This is very very wrong. Sheesh. Stop.

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

#730

Post by danielmarkbruce »

dguest wrote: post #671
irjustin wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not just turtles all the way down If you drill far enough... well anyway > I don't know of any machine where dollars go in one side, are destroyed, and euros are created on the other side. The Treasury is the machine you're looking for. And the wire transfer, SWIFT, usually, is the tool of choice. In a sense, yes dollars are "destroyed" in that they leave that monetary system. Banks like BoA hold a few kind of…

> The Treasury is the machine you're looking for... In a sense, yes dollars are "destroyed" in that they leave that monetary system. So are you saying there's an procedure where the US treasury takes USD out of circulation, and the ECB introduces the equivalent in Euro, according to some official exchange rate? How do they set the exchange rate?

No, of course there isn't. The explanation is absolutely ridiculous.

Go ask chatgpt, it will explain it quite well.

Post reply on HN