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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

#111

Post by Pooge »

petterroea wrote: post #106
Pooge wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate? Genuinely interested.

Visa and MasterCard are basically redundant except for international transactions. We already mostly use QR code payments, which is a semi-open standard and somewhat vendor agnostic(with caveats). It works internationally. Japan has it's own card companies, and payment systems. Recently, some train lines have started adding support for Visa, but trust me that if you use it in rush hour you will be considered a knob h…

Makes sense. I lived there for a year and visit yearly and at the time I didn't notice such an aggressive campaign from Visa.

IC cards indeed are much faster from my experience (in Hong-Kong and Singapore).

I hope we can get rid of Visa and MasterCard because they are the reason we don't have free, instant payments.

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

#112

Post by throwaway473825 »

rkachowski wrote: post #105
raron wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wero is just another private company trying get their cut of payment fees. You can do the same thing with SEPA Instant Payment (or some member states outside of the Eurozone have their own similar thing). I don't see why Wero should exists, their business model seems like "trying to get money for the same service you can get for free".

wero is a european initiative set up by a consortium of banks that is built layered upon instant payments. it's not a private company like paypal or visa, its an attempt at making European payment infrastructure

Sweden has a similar "initiative" set up by a consortium of banks (Swish), as do many other European countries.

Usually these systems raise their fees after being established, sometimes even higher than Visa/Mastercard.

Brazil's Pix is something else. It wasn't created by private entities to make money.

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

#113

Post by martheen »

madaxe_again wrote: post #107
protastus wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Pix is ok - but it’s clunky to use and has a single point of failure. On the former - paying is: Unlock phone Launch app Authenticate Choose to pay with pix Scan QR code Enter amount Authenticate again Wait Payment made Show cashier your phone Which is considerably more involved than a contactless payment. On the single point of failure side of things - I was at an event in Brasilia a month or so back, pix grinds to…

Doesn't seem too different from QRIS in Indonesia, authentication is relatively painless since some apps offer either pin or fingerprint. Being open standard (multiple banks, electronic wallet and payment gateways support it, multiple payment apps support it, all interoperable) probably help since there's never any delay I've experienced for years, and this system is handling from small payment on roadside hawkers to electronic purchase in large stores both offline and online.

More fancy payment flow are also available, such as vendors generating one-time QR code that already include the payment amount, and the user apps generating one-time QR code that the vendor scan, thus switching some of user steps to the vendor.

In most cities I've lived and visited, using QR is far more convenient than paper. Good luck using contactless when most phones don't support it, and even when Visa & MasterCard pushed their contactless standard, I never encounter a single vendor with a working machine (this range from small shops to large hypermarket). Maybe because they have bigger MDR than QR, but from customers PoV contactless simply don't work, until QRIS also adopt NFC and suddenly it's workable (but not widespread yet since most phones still don't)

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

#114

Post by throwaway473825 »

burnJS wrote: post #74

Brazil can do this. Why can't we?

Most likely because your country's banks are heavily lobbying against such initiatives.

It's easy to blame Visa and Mastercard, but the reason why the EU doesn't have this is that the EPP (the largest political group in the European Parliament) answers to European banks, which don't want it.

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

#116

Post by vitorgrs »

madaxe_again wrote: post #107
protastus wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Pix is ok - but it’s clunky to use and has a single point of failure. On the former - paying is: Unlock phone Launch app Authenticate Choose to pay with pix Scan QR code Enter amount Authenticate again Wait Payment made Show cashier your phone Which is considerably more involved than a contactless payment. On the single point of failure side of things - I was at an event in Brasilia a month or so back, pix grinds to…

There's Pix contactless payment. Both Samsung and Google wallet support. Samsung added a few weeks ago. Google added 1 or 2 years ago.

You can actually pay QR Code Pix now with Samsung by just opening the camera too.

Apple refuses to implement Pix on Apple Pay, and regulatory agencies are trying to change that...

Pix integration with Google Pay it's just amazing.

Imagine the situation in the US as if every app or website magically used Google Pay.

Well, that's Brazil now if you use Android. Because as soon as you copy a Pix code, it will prompt Google Pay :) And every service in Brazil have Pix... Even international ones as Stripe supports...

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

#117

Post by x-complexity »

Lvl999Noob wrote: post #94
matheusmoreira wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Pix is already 100% surveilled And Visa and MasterCard aren't surveiled? Isn't one of their selling points that they surveil every transaction and automatically block anything suspicious? And increasingly, the parameters for suspicious include anything pornographic or even 'pornographic' (see: the bullying of steam to remove explicit games). At least with Pix, the costs get lower for the end users.

> > Pix is already 100% surveilled

> And Visa and MasterCard aren't surveiled?

Who is doing the surveilling is the difference. In the latter, the surveillance is done by the private sector, in aims of better targeted advertising.

In the former, it's done by either the government or by a government-tied organization, and thus invites a left-hand-passes-to-right-hand scenario, wherein the data & metadata obtained from the system could be passed to law enforcement for prosecution (doubly so if the transactions could be bundled as evidence).

> Isn't one of their selling points that they surveil every transaction and automatically block anything suspicious? And increasingly, the parameters for suspicious include anything pornographic or even 'pornographic' (see: the bullying of steam to remove explicit games).

The censorship pressures made onto Visa & Mastercard was done not by the government, but by PACs & non-governmental organizations. It is through the use of "think of the children" that they push them into censoring transactions, under the implicit threat that lawsuits will be filed if such transactions remain allowed.

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

#118

Post by vitorgrs »

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.

e.g you can subscribe monthly to ChatGPT or Amazon Prime using Pix. It's called "Automatic Pix".

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

#119

Post by kjetijor »

Nathanba wrote: post #77
laurencerowe wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bankin…

Sharing banking information is not safe in Europe, decades ago a phone scammer convinced me to give them my information and they were able to pull money from my account without any permission from me whatsoever, they just acted like I already signed up to their scam service when I never did. That was a completely foreign and insane idea to me (and it is still insane and should not be allowed) that someone can simply…

"decades ago"

Granted, I'm mostly familiar with the Scandinavian bit of Europe, but you can't do jack shit with banking without 2FA which is tied into the national population register.

They decided in the 80ies or 90ies that "relying on knowing secret fixed magic numbers" was not ideal for authenticating people, and sat down and worked out solutions to that problem.

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

#120

Post by vitorgrs »

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

Several backs had a good amount of TED limit. Although everything changed when Nubank launched, giving unlimited TEDs to everyone. Most banks followed at the time, so basically around 2015~ several big banks had unlimited TEDs.

The problem with TED it's just how hard it was to send money. You had to insert, if I recall right:

- Person full name - Social security number - Select the Bank Name - The type of account (savings or checking account) - Agency and account number

This basically means that TED was used as a serious payment thing, like money you receive from your company, etc.

A lot of companies still use TED.

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