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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

#231

Post by gaigalas »

reese_john wrote: post #129

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…

You are incorrect.

What went down were apps from banks that use PIX, not the core infrastructure.

That is responsibility of the banks. It means private banks like Itau and Nubank rely on Amazon, not the Central Bank. They relied on those hyperscalers for their operation, and their gateways went down with it.

PIX has sovereign, private infrastructure on brazillian soil managed by Banco Central. NIC.br and other essential services do the same.

PIX is ours.

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

#233

Post by matheusmoreira »

c7b wrote: post #122
matheusmoreira wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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…

I'm not american. I'm commenting on my own country.

As I said, I'm not defending credit card companies here. Just pointing out the fact that there are problems with pix. It's not the silver bullet people think it is.

And yes, it is worse when the public sector does it. You can actually use the government to fight the private sector when it screws you over. When the government does it, then it's just the system working as intended.

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

#234

Post by matheusmoreira »

jeroenhd wrote: post #150
matheusmoreira wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Pix is already 100% surveilled Visa and Mastercard are 300% surveilled: once by the Brazilian government, once by the payment providers themselves, and then finally by the American government. There are privacy implications of cashless societies, but these foreign companies are worse in every aspect.

Nowhere did I say otherwise.

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

#235

Post by zorked »

reese_john wrote: post #137
vitorgrs wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Your comment is absolute nonsense.

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

#236

Post by matheusmoreira »

subw00f wrote: post #199
matheusmoreira wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Such a naive take. Like the US government espionage is not deeply embedded in even the most basic infrastructure, let alone payment gateways. They probably spend millions on huge data pipelines straight to the fucking pentagon.

Nothing naive about it. Brazil is not the USA. It hasn't exactly demonstrated an ability to "deeply embed" itself into internet backbones the way the USA does. The problem with Pix is: they don't need to.

Lack of capabilities limit the scope of government tyranny. It used to be that the government didn't have the manpower required to audit everyone and everything, so only the bank transactions above some threshold would be monitored. With pix, they are monitoring 100% of transactions now. This is a massive gain in capability that should not be ignored.

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

#237

Post by 202508042147 »

nolok wrote: post #175
ginko wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's exactly what's happening, see the EU digital euro scheme. It's planned to be free of fees too, modeled around how SEPA was done for wires. There has been massive resistance by the incumbents of course, including banks (since they too charge a fee on top of visa). It's been in the backlog for years but the US sanction against ICC judges leading to them being cut off from most things including payment triggered…

That's what I am afraid of. The resistance from the incumbents plus the external pressure from the US (and China?) might be to strong. Better go with a federated approach, mandating all the different payment apps available all over the EU to allow connections from other participants.

In any case, the digital euro seems to take years (earlier expected date is 2029). I don't understand why it takes so long.

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

#238

Post by jmyeet »

WinstonSmith84 wrote: post #152

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…

> 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.

Oh they absolutely will. And the US government will come to their aid.

Consider the case of Bombardier [1], a Canadian airplane manufacturer. Boeing was caught with its pants down by Airbus with the A320/321 and panicked into making the 737MAX. Boeing has a captive audience with US airlines and the 737. A shared type rating is a massive advantage for Boeing but the economics of the Airbus narrow bodies were just too good.

Then along comes this Canadian companiy who saw an opportunity to create a narrow body commercial jet in this range (100-150 seats) and some US airlines were interested. To avoid this Boeing offered United a deep discount to not buy the CSeries and Bombardier responded with discounts of their own.

What happened? Boeing then went to the government and accused Bombardier of "dumping" as well as having goavernment subsidies. This is particularly funny if you know anything about the billions in subsidies Boeing gets from both Washington state and the federal government. The US governments made complaitns to the WTO and ended up imposing a 300% tariff on Bombardier, effectively killing that business. It eventually became the Airbus A220.

Free markets, by the way.

The US will punish foreign companies for competing on price by abusing process and treaties, ignoring it whne it's inconvenient, use tariffs with flimsy excuses, punish unrelated industries to apply pressure and otherwise bully other countries for daring to compoete.

Being American companies is unacceptable. So is doing anything that serve as a model to any other country that might threaten an American monopoly or oligopoly.

So prepare for accusations of government subsidies and the US applying pressure in unrelated areas because of this.

As an aside, the US does this with governments too. "Oh, you wanted to profit from your own natural resources and use that money for the benefit of the people? I think not. Look at this system of government that isn't working. Nevermind that we're starving it with brutal economic sanctions. It doesn't work. Look away. Nothing to see here."

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSeries_dumping_petition_by_Bo...

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

#239

Post by 202508042147 »

kakacik wrote: post #205
melting_snow wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Twint is in Switzerland for more than 10 years, hardly a new idea

Twint is great, I wish more Swiss based people would use it. In the expat community most are using Visa/MC through Apple Pay. I have no idea why.

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

#240

Post by shimman »

forinti wrote: post #222
h4kunamata wrote: post #91

Read: The USA does not like what they cannot control!! I am glad to see the EU following Brazil with its own payment system. Visa/MasterCard/Paypal era is gone!!

The US has a long tradition of arm-twisting to forward its business interests. This habit is starting to do more harm than good (to them) and they should try to focus on innovating the way China does.

I think you mean this habit has benefit no one outside of a small elite moneyed interests that want to protect their fief.

US foreign policy does not benefit Americans, it benefits the elites.

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