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

elciudadano.com

161–170 of 397 posts

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

#161

I can see that Visa and Mastercard are freaking out, not because Pix can take over their business model, but because it can give ideas to other countries doing the same. I've spent three months earlier this year in Brazil and never used Pix once. Not because I didn't want, but because I couldn't, or let's be honest: my time was not worth the hassle. To be able to pay with Pix, one needs to get a CPF (Brazilian Tax ID…

> To be able to pay with Pix, one needs to get a CPF (Brazilian Tax ID).

There are third party apps you can use to pay with pix using a credit card, can't recall that name, but read about it here a few months back, on another pix-thread.

> CPF (Brazilian Tax ID). Then to open a bank account

Getting a CPF is absolutely trivial, but I'm not sure you can open a bank account without RN/RNE, at least not with local banks. Can probably manage with one of the online banks.

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

#162

I can see that Visa and Mastercard are freaking out, not because Pix can take over their business model, but because it can give ideas to other countries doing the same. I've spent three months earlier this year in Brazil and never used Pix once. Not because I didn't want, but because I couldn't, or let's be honest: my time was not worth the hassle. To be able to pay with Pix, one needs to get a CPF (Brazilian Tax ID…

> but because it can give ideas to other countries doing the same This is happening right now in Europe. You have systems like Blik, Twint, Swish etc. I know that at least Blik is working on making it possible for international payments.

> I know that at least Blik is working on making it possible for international payments

International transfers between MB Way (PT) and Bizum (ES) are working e.g. via phone number. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Alliance

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

#163

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 process was hard to use, it could take days and the fees were huge, depending on your bank. Pix solved all these problems.

Nearing 17:00 in a bank: Does anyone here need to do a TED or a DOC? Come to attendant now before the system shuts down for the day!

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

#164

I can see that Visa and Mastercard are freaking out, not because Pix can take over their business model, but because it can give ideas to other countries doing the same. I've spent three months earlier this year in Brazil and never used Pix once. Not because I didn't want, but because I couldn't, or let's be honest: my time was not worth the hassle. To be able to pay with Pix, one needs to get a CPF (Brazilian Tax ID…

> but because it can give ideas to other countries doing the same This is happening right now in Europe. You have systems like Blik, Twint, Swish etc. I know that at least Blik is working on making it possible for international payments.

What's needed in Europe is federation of the existing systems, not one winner taking it all.

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

#165

India's UPI is also extremely quick and easy to use - instant transfers with just the person's phone number or via a QR code or via a UPI id which looks like an email id. We are talking about 19-20 billion transactions per month. Apart from UPI, there are other interbank transfers methods such as NEFT, IMPS, RTGS etc. All quite convenient and easy to use.

In some setups UPI doesn't even internet! Just an SMS is sufficient

There is UPI wallet (preload your wallet) that require no internet. But this still require a smartphone.

The SMS option is mainly to avoid requiring a smartphone. There is a huge population that do not have a smartphone.

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

#166
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brazilian living in NL, experienced in both. I think biggest difference is Tikkie doesn't give you an easy identifier. Great for privacy, but being able to send money to your email/phone number makes a difference for some real time use cases. QR code helps, but it is not the same.

IBAN works pretty ok as an identifier when you need that. Bank transfers between Dutch banks are almost instant anyway

It is instant provided your financial institution works within the SEPA Instant transfer system

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

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The EU is literally working on an alternative as we speak: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht... I think the cryptocurrency-based implementation is stupid and a product of its time, but the EU is investing a lot of money into a system to push Visa and Mastercard out. Many countries have their own payment systems already, often widely successful. Integration between these systems has been ann…

The EU would obviously benefit from a digital euro, but the banks won't give up without a fight:

https://euperspectives.eu/2026/02/digital-euro-timeline-at-r...

>Private banks are resistant to a digital euro both as a payment method and a store of value. The digital euro is designed to be a free, public payment method, directly challenging fee-based systems operated by banks. This is its key usefulness in terms of sovereignty. But it could also be used as a digital wallet and users may move their money out of private bank accounts to central bank-backed digital euro wallets meaning banks lose out.

So far they have successfully delayed any implementation.

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

#168

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.

Of course they are. Theirs is a more corporate surveillance, though. I'm genuinely afraid of what the brazilian government can do with this sort of data.

Third party doctrine means corporate surveillance is state surveillance. And unlike Pix covering just Brazil, CC companies cover the whole world.

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

#169

I can see that Visa and Mastercard are freaking out, not because Pix can take over their business model, but because it can give ideas to other countries doing the same. I've spent three months earlier this year in Brazil and never used Pix once. Not because I didn't want, but because I couldn't, or let's be honest: my time was not worth the hassle. To be able to pay with Pix, one needs to get a CPF (Brazilian Tax ID…

There is India's UPI (launched in 2016), Singapore PayNow (Launched 2017) that works in a similar way. And they also work across each platform.. UPI users in India can transfer to Paynow users in Singapore and vice versa. [1] https://www.dbs.com.sg/personal/deposits/pay-with-ease/payno...

some UPI users to some Paynow users. (limited to participating institutions only).

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

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wero's Dutch predecessor, iDEAL, has been an established part of online payments for 20 years now. As barely anyone has a credit card and very people want to deal with the faff of manually entering billing codes or account numbers, iDEAL usage is near universal for online payments. I don't recall fees ever going up as an end customer.

Card fees aren't paid by end customers either. The Swedish iDEAL equivalent, Swish, is more expensive than cards for smaller transactions (below 15 euros). Wero will be like Swish, not Pix.
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