The main issue in this market is that the consumer doesn’t pay the cost of the transaction, therefore there is no pressure to reduce costs, and hence no innovation. All of this could be solved if a government regulated that consumers must pay the fee. Here, in the UK, we have obviously regulated the exact opposite of a sensible regulation and were “shocked” when total fees paid on transactions exploded.
Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard
131–140 of 397 posts
Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard
#132The only problem I actually face with Pix in Brazil is:
Some stores only accept Pix and don’t want Visa or cash. As a tourist, you end up unable to access a lot of things because, well, we don’t have Pix.
While I was in Brazil, some thugs with pistols came into a bar where I was. They forced people to send a Pix payment to a specific account, and their money was gone. In the credit card era, I guess the companies, insurance providers, and banks could reverse the transaction and cover the losses. With Pix, as I understand it, nobody feels responsible for it and the money is gone.
Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard
#133Brazil can do this. Why can't we?
Vietnam has a system like this too, QR based and free. India has UPI.
QR payments are ubiquitous in South East Asia. The eventual goal is ASEAN-wide interoperability, and some are even already interoperable with South Korean, Japanese and Chinese counterparts. And as expected, the US is also complaining about those, merely because Americans can't grasp the concept, like how they lag on pin adoption.
Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard
#134Brazil can do this. Why can't we?
who are we?
Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard
#135I've been living abroad for over a decade now, so I never got to experience Pix. I went back to Brazil a few years ago for a couple of weeks, and a kid on the streets asked me if I could buy some chewing gum and help him out. I wanted to, but I had no cash, so I told him I had no cash at all. He said "It's fine, just send me some with Pix". I still remember the incredulous look on his face when I told him I also didn…
had the same experience.. "how come you dont have Pix?"
Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard
#136It 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…
Only reinforces the point that relying on american infrastructure as a critical piece of your stack, in 2026, is a liability.
Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 web…
USD is a hard currency unlike the BRL. It is not supposed to move that fast by design. Google “Regulation E”. Brazil has no such strong provisions for protecting unauthorized transfers out of your account
Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard
#138Duopolists whining about competition eh?
Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard
#139Earlier 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 censorship is a massive issue though as it effectively means that private companies can overrule the law if they effectively monopolize critical infrastructure. Private companies are even less accountable to individuals than governments are when there is no real market choice.
Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
It should be possible, they issue CPF numbers even for tourists if you want.
Problem is you need a Brazilian bank account... Opening a foreign bank account creates tax nightmares.
Ah, so they're leaving the money on the table. I suppose they're worried about money laundering.
Indonesia's electronic wallet have two tiers, unverified and verified. You don't even need a bank account (because most people don't), just a local number (which even tourist can buy easily at airport), with the limitation on unverified tier is that you can only top it up (by cash if you don't have local bank account) and spend it on merchant, no receiving nor sending money. There's also transaction limit but most of the population won't cross that in normal days.