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Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard

elciudadano.com

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Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard

#51

Post by usrnm »

jacknews wrote: post #3

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 ...

> 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.

Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard

#52

Post by yndoendo »

jnettome wrote: post #25

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.

For what MAGA views as good for the USA is actually deplorable loss for the civilized world.

Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard

#54

Post by cassianoleal »

augusto-moura wrote: post #45
cassianoleal wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> We had TED, but it was not instant, nor was it free.

Not instant, but pretty close for the time. It might not have been free but most basic bank packages had a bunch of TED transfers included. For everything else, there was still DOC which would happen overnight and was either free or cheaper than TED.

I'm not dissing Pix in any way. Pix is probably the most advanced transfers and payments system in the world, and I'm 100% with you on how well it was (and still is) executed.

I was mostly responding to:

> how difficult it was to transfer money before Pix, even between local banks.

It was certainly not.

I remember being in the UK a couple years after I was on that bank, and being shocked at how primitive everything related to banking was. Transfers would take days or even weeks and would be incredibly awkward to make. Cheques were the quickest way to transfer money between people - other than cash, obviously, but that was not always desired.

A few years later I visited the US and it was even more retrograde than what I had seen in the UK all those years before.

Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard

#56

Post by adrithmetiqa »

protastus wrote: post #41
jszymborski wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you say that Pix is comparable to Canada's Interac Debit?

Speaking as a non-expert, I think Pix has much bigger scope. Pix is account-to-account. One can buy real estate, pay bills, make person-to-person and business-to-business transactions, government payments, recurring payments. The funds also settle instantly. Most people don't experience the full scope of Pix which is impressive.

The credit card companies really missed the boat here to become the standard for consumer to consumer payments. Of course, from their perspective, they know that people would not accept having to pay for this service so the companies won’t go near it.

Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard

#58

Post by johnea »

protastus wrote: post #30
dbolgheroni wrote: post #15

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) cha…

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 hav…

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.

Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard

#59

Post by laurencerowe »

pimeys wrote: post #32

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.

Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard

#60

Post by tardedmeme »

shpx wrote: post #27

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…

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.
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