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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

#291

Post by 3x35r22m4u »

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 wonder if I showed up (as a foreign visiting) in the US how long it would take and what kind of documents would it take to have a Visa/Mastercard. I guess it would be the same as having or even longer to have your CPF issued and a digital account here in Brazil.

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

#292

Post by sowbug »

Qem wrote: post #269
rbanffy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a group of people impose a 1-3% tax on their population. It seems the consensus is that a taxes are only bad if you have to pay the government. If it's a small set of companies that collectively own a virtual monopoly, it's because they earned it.

This is probably the Holy Grail of neoliberalism: Even taxes are privatized!

If half my local plumber's profits go to private equity, it's capitalism. If half go to taxes, it's socialism.

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

#293

Post by bombcar »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #270
bombcar wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We always got traveler’s checks from AAA which were “free”.

I assume the quotes because maybe no transaction fee but massive spread on the exchange!

Well it was dollars for dollars so they really were free (except for the AAA membership).

International money exchange has always been fun, luckily for us we never really travelled anywhere that you couldn't just use dollars.

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

#294

Post by DanielHB »

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…

Funny annecdote: I have a friend who worked at iFood (brazilian food delivery company) and apparently they moved their entire AWS stack to us-east-1 because sa-east-1 did not have enough capacity to handle the load they had. This is why iFood has a very high latency* during user interactions.

*: for people used to online gaming

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

#295

Post by DanielHB »

pyrale wrote: post #216
reese_john wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a real problem outside of niche industries American companies are great to do business with. Most countries, including Brazil, simply don’t have the capability to pull this on their own. Not enough tech talent nor infrastructure

> Most countries, including Brazil, simply don’t have the capability to pull this on their own. Not enough tech talent nor infrastructure One really wonders how the internet could even have happened before the hyperscalers appeared.

Mostly grumpy IT people handling small racks running VMWare in their office and taking 6 months to set up a VM for you.

I am not joking.

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

#296

Post by rpgbr »

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…

Pix isn't intended (yet) for foreigners to use. It's mostly for local Brazilians, and here it's brilliant: free for personal use, really fast (frequently instantaneous, has a 10 second limit), and accessible (every major bank and most of the smaller ones supports it).

I can understand why Visa and Mastercard are worried. Apple is as well, since it refuses to support Pix in Apple Pay, which is mandatory in Brazil. But honestly? Fuck these companies. (Sorry about my French, I couldn't think of another way to put it.)

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

#297

Post by childintime »

jeroenhd wrote: post #154
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 does several things. You can already send instant payments if you fill out IBAN and such, but entering order numbers, account references, and other such cruft for purchasing products is a pain. Companies receiving such payments also need to connect payment to a user and update their digital processes somehow. Wero offers such a solution so you don't have to find a PSD2 processor (which will probably cost just as…

So how can a QR code not supply the necessary data? Example:

   payment://iban=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX&amount=12.34EUR
Any bank app should be able to read this. What is so complicated? Right, nothing. Credit card companies are a hidden tax, worse, they are a tax on turnover, not profits.

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

#298

Post by DanielHB »

cbgonz wrote: post #281

I´m always baffled by the fact that PIX discussions (almost?) never address issues of privacy: the whole system is offered (and run) by the Brazilian central bank. Due to its popularity here, the central bank has enormous, detailed and live insight into a citizen´s financial life. Even the dullest and most unimaginative civil servant / tax office employee / security or police member must have wet dreams imagining all…

Yeah, but it is technically protected by "Sigilo bancário" law:

https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigilo_banc%C3%A1rio

Meaning you need a court order to get access to personal transfer statements and the government already forced private institutions from reporting certain types of transactions to the central government.

It is not ideal, since this is not a constitutional right, just a law. But not that different from how it was before. However I believe the central bank can use anonamized data, which can be a good (analytics on where population spend money) or a bad (cracking down on certain types of business) thing.

Also it has come to a point that data going to private companies (like VISA/Mastercard) always ends up sold to private (and usually foreign) data-brokers to make profiles on you, at least the gov doesn't do that*. The main argument is that PIX is killing cash transactions, that is the _real_ loss here.

Like the political targeted ads backed by Russia during the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal, preventing foreign companies from analytics on your population is now a national security concern.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica

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

#299

Post by malvim »

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…

Lots of countries around Brazil are taking pix. Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay.

And you can totally expand the idea. The fact that you need national id for pix doesn’t mean the idea “doesn’t scale.” It means the current implementation of it is not focused on use by visitors.

I really don’t understand what you’re getting at, it seems like a pretty narrow view of the possibilities.

Meanwhile US citizens are using paper (cash and cheques) for lots of transactions. Or one of the big credit card corporations.

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

#300

Post by Scoring6931 »

cbgonz wrote: post #281

I´m always baffled by the fact that PIX discussions (almost?) never address issues of privacy: the whole system is offered (and run) by the Brazilian central bank. Due to its popularity here, the central bank has enormous, detailed and live insight into a citizen´s financial life. Even the dullest and most unimaginative civil servant / tax office employee / security or police member must have wet dreams imagining all…

As if Visa and Mastercard did not sell customer data...
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