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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

#121

Post by vitorgrs »

orochimaaru wrote: post #78
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…

Is this similar to India's UPI? Visa and MasterCard exist (and grumble from time to time) but aren't needed.

Yep.

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

#122

Post by c7b »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #93
cloche wrote: post #46

> Since 2022, Mastercard Brazil’s CEO, Marcelo Tangioni, has voiced his concerns: “Pix is great, beneficial for the industry. What’s not great is that it falls under the Central Bank. It can’t regulate and compete at the same time”. Why not? This is such an American point of view that sounds similar to why the IRS doesn't offer easier tax filing options.

[flagged]

Visa/Mastercard are also 100% surveilled. The nightmare of your transactions being monitored and arbitrarily blocked that's peddled as an argument against CBDCs or public financial infrastructure like Pix is already a reality for all of traditional finance (with the exception of physical cash, which happens to also be a central bank product). Sometimes even balances get confiscated, read the horror stories by Stripe customers. Americans seem to believe that the same thing is necessarily worse if it's done in the public sector. Other countries tend to see it differently. Just let them be.

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

#123

Post by vitorgrs »

x-complexity wrote: post #117
Lvl999Noob wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 government already have card transaction access though. If you are in the banking system - you are being tracked. Doesn't matter if is Pix or a card.

Doesn't mean they will automatically expose you, as it requires justice approval technically...

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

#126

Post by pelasaco »

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…

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

The difficulties were the same as everywhere. I worked in Bank in Brazil and in Germany. A lot of the difficulties we still face in Germany today.

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

#127

Post by laurencerowe »

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…

In the UK direct debits don't require 2FA (but do require approved forms either online or on paper) but you can also very easily get a refund for any direct debit taken from your account so I assume it's simply not worth the scammers' time.

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

#128

Post by pelasaco »

cassianoleal wrote: post #40
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 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.

Exactly, I worked in the SPB (https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistema_de_Pagamentos_Brasilei...) and was/is pretty well structured and well implemented.

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

#129

Post by reese_john »

It is worth noting that despite all this cheap sovereignty talk from Brazil’s president, in practice Brazil would not be able to operate Pix at that scale without heavily relying on American hyperscalers companies.

Brazilian institutions are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to US cloud providers, specially AWS, to be able to process that many transactions.

Earlier this year, when sa-east-1 was down, major banks were forced to suspend Pix payments for nearly 3 hours. When this happens, some people are literally not able to buy anything because that’s their only payment method. So much for “President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva proclaiming a nationwide campaign: “Pix is ours, my friend”.”

Don’t get me wrong, Pix has been a great success and a major achievement, but all this adversarial political talk between the US and Brazil administrations is really cringe, both countries are better doing business together.

[1]https://economia.uol.com.br/noticias/redacao/2026/02/07/falh...

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

#130

Post by x-complexity »

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…

> It's surprising that Visa and Mastercard are even private companies.

Asianometry provides a great summary as to how both of them came to be: For Visa, a 1976 rebranding of the BankAmericard program. For Mastercard, a 1966 meeting of banks as opposition to BankAmericard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2rKS4l6MAk

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