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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

#731

Post by littlestymaar »

whimsicalism wrote: post #306
littlestymaar wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any european who happened to have become sick once in the US can tell you about that if you will.

i have friends who have had to deal with the NHS and absolutely ridiculous (like year+) wait times for specialists. frankly i find the american healthcare system quite good if you have good job-tied insurance. most of the problems arise because we don’t have any sort of triage for high need issues and thus get overutilization and high cost.

> frankly i find the american healthcare system quite good if you have good job-tied insurance

Soviet union was fine too if you were an apparatchik…

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

#732

Post by danielmarkbruce »

dguest wrote: post #621
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.

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…

Yes, it's just the banks. They have both. It's really not rocket science.

It should be satisfying in the following sense - the financial system is nowhere near as complicated as it seems. There is no magic. If you find yourself feeling like there is some magic somewhere, just ask another question because there is likely just a word or a layer of indirection that is making something quite simple seem mysterious.

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

#733

Post by ninalanyon »

earnesti wrote: post #75
pjc50 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And quite a lot of Western ones like Vipps. And see this long list: https://truelayer.com/reports/alternative-payments/european-... > 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.

>> 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…

Vipps works in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland.

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

#734

Post by whimsicalism »

refulgentis wrote: post #568
whimsicalism wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i wish i was not sympathetic to those arguments - and i used to not be, but then i actually worked in the federal government. perhaps local governments can efficiently provision services but the feds are handicapped in so many different ways it would be quite challenging to untangle. realistically, the workforce that was hired around sorting through hundreds of thousands of bureaucratic paper documents in the 70s/80s…

18F was definitively the latter. You'd be surprised how bad FAANG is, too.

Having worked in FAANG and for the Feds (on a project that was in collaboration with 18F, to boot), I respectfully disagree. You simply do not get the same calibre of technical operators or even just product operators in the federal government, full stop. Maybe they exist, but they're going to be occupying high up/plum positions because people like that are so rare.

In practice, it is software consulting companies that are doing all of the heavy lifting while the federal workers largely sit back and collect their paycheck - and talented operators are extremely rare there as well.

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

#735

Post by kspacewalk2 »

Spivak wrote: post #573
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The flat fee is a small part of what that transfer costs. The real transaction fee is embedded in the exchange rate. 2% markup is not an unheard of amount, which I guess would make your total cost $515 and not $15. There's a reason Wise is a huge business and people in Canada resort to "Norbert's gambit" to exchange currency with minimal transaction costs.

I think it was about 1% off the "theoretical best" exchange rate I could have gotten. But I don't exactly have access to those kinds of rates as an individual. Do crypto trades not have the same dynamic once you involve exchanges? Once you include the take from the USD ~> Crypto ~> $Other do you still come out ahead?

No idea, never owned or used crypto. I guess for large amounts the reference point should be total transaction cost using Wise and/or some version of Norbert's gambit if your currency pair is a popular one and dual-listed securities/ETFs are readily available.

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

#736

Post by Vilian »

irusensei wrote: post #702
shaky-carrousel wrote: post #602

> it gives the central bank a worrying amount of power Heh, only an American would say that. What a peculiar worldview.

I say that as a Brazilian. I have no idea why one would trust a central institution specially on corruption ridden Brazil.

because companies aren't corrupt somehow right

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

#738

Post by [deleted] »

alephnerd wrote: post #524
kaiwenwang wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello, the things you're talking about (previous comments, not just this) are interesting career-wise. If I studied Computer Science (long-term I do not see myself programming forever) and only have internships related in that area, how would you recommend getting into this field?

> If I studied Computer Science (long-term I do not see myself programming forever) and only have internships related in that area, how would you recommend getting into this field? Just keep studying CS. Climb up the ladder to Staff SWE, PM, or EM; and execute and lose hair from there. As Pastuer said, "fortune favors a prepared mind". Most hot thinkers today were hetrodox a couple years ago. You make more money rema…

[deleted]

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

#739

Post by scrubs »

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? Sowing or stirring up doubt or implicitly initiating a conspiracy means you don't have an argument for crypto.

Bitcoin can never be a Pix replacement. It's too damn slow, and others have pointed out, having to manage the entire transaction history is just stupid. (A end customer might not have to do serious book keeping on transaction history, but companies would.)

Pix works great for Brazil. That's what it was intended to do. And that's what it does. Case-closed.

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

#740

Post by c7b »

kaiwenwang wrote: post #521
alephnerd wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not disagreeing with you. CBDCs are dumb from a financial standpoint. > Again, you can get all of that without needing a CBDC Yep. Pretty much. > For what gain? Because if X country is doing it, Y country should do it as well, and then export the associated infra to a less developed country. By the 2020s, it became a completion between Chinese vs Indian consultancies (ay least in Africa) You have to remember the…

Hello, the things you're talking about (previous comments, not just this) are interesting career-wise. If I studied Computer Science (long-term I do not see myself programming forever) and only have internships related in that area, how would you recommend getting into this field?

We'd probably need more background to help you, eg, are you currently a student? In what country? Assuming you're in the US, there are still some interesting things the Fed does wrt to payments, eg Fedwire, but getting into anything public-sector-related will be difficult at the moment. You could check out DCI at MIT Media Lab [0], they have some interesting projects in this space (eg Hamilton). If you're in a different country, most central banks are currently looking at CBDCs in some way. Many central banks also employ nationals of other countries, so you can cast a wider net than looking at just one country. In the private sector, there are several companies and/or academic groups that have helped smaller central banks set up their own CBDCs already, eg Cambodia uses Hyperledger with the help of some Japanese groups [1]. Word is that Polygon is also active in that space, but I don't have any references otomh. Larger countries will do a lot of development in-house. They will likely get outside help from the likes of Accenture or IBM. These could be good destinations themselves, but only if you're happy to be be working on something else most likely.

[0] https://dci.mit.edu/ [1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aepr.12464

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