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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

#331

Post by fakedang »

jangxx wrote: post #263
bilekas wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pix is a good local idea, but the world needs something better. There is no problem to continue using maybe Visa/Mastercard when dealing abroad or external, but when you are a normal citizen, it's far better to use Pix in this case, you are supporting a national company, paying fee's to them and not at the whims of an external countries policies. Edit: They also tend to be non profits ironically enough. In Ireland…

We might be getting something soon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_euro

Europe spends way too much time and money on various Fintech pet projects. There's the Digital Euro and then there's Wero and Target and a bunch of other shit that doesn't reach consumer scale usage or attention.

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

#332

Post by pjg »

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…

There is nothing preventing PIX from going global (just like VISA/MC). If you look at the history of domestic systems e.g. China Unipay, India UPI/Rupay, Japan JCB they started off as local systems and went global.

Japan JCB is Internationally accepted. China Unipay is also considerably "international" i.e. internationally accepted and India's UPI/Rupay card is adding new countries at a fast clip. The reason most people "don't know" whether they can pay with China Unipay or India's Rupay is because they are not advertised with the same logos as VISA/MC on acceptance sites.

However both China Unipay and India's Rupay through their partnership with Discover Card (now owned by CapitalOne ) are accepted anywhere Discover card is accepted

The place where these "domestic" systems haven't quite measured up to VISA/MC is the issuing side i.e. the entities controlling these systems currently do not allow foreign banks to issue cards with their logos or use their network to settle the transactions. If you're in the US, you may not get a Unipay or Rupay card from a local bank. There are multiple reasons for that, some strategic some political.

It will be interesting to see how they evolve over time. In spite of the exponential rise of PIX , UPI and Unipay, VISA and MC themselves have been doing remarkably well in the past 10-20 years. Unlikely either of them will go belly up.

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

#333

Post by hocuspocus »

madspindel wrote: post #328
hocuspocus wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swish is even older. The issues with Twint: - Switzerland hasn't gotten Apple to open up NFC payments at the same conditions as the EEE, at least not yet. - Twint is part of the EMPSA which hasn't really delivered anything tangible. On the contrary there's now a real push from EPI and EuroPA to make Wero interoperable with non-Eurozone networks. Hopefully Twint will get on board too. - Transaction fees are on the hig…

> Twint is part of the EMPSA which hasn't really delivered anything tangible. It's easy to see why. Both Swish and Vipps is part of EMPSA. In Sweden, everyone uses Swish. Vipps (from Norway I believe) wants to expand to Sweden but no one is using it since it's not compatible with Swish. So making it compatible would potentially hurt the business of Swish. Regulation is needed. Otherwise it will never happen.

If EPI / Wero reach a critical mass then hopefully this will change, as non-Eurozone countries will have a direct interest in making the local mobile payment solution accept the one used by an area of 350+ million people.

Then the EPI protocol could become the least common denominator and you might be able to use Vipps, Twint, Blik... in Sweden? I believe similar scenarios are happening in Asia around Alipay and UPI, for instance I think I can use the Korean Kakao Pay on a payment terminal in Japan, because both sides are compatible with Alipay+.

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

#334

Post by pyrale »

DanielHB wrote: post #295
pyrale wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> I am not joking.

Well, I was...

> and taking 6 months to set up a VM for you.

Your sysadmins were extraordinarily grumpy. Were you working with the ur-bofh?

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

#335

Post by matheusmoreira »

c7b wrote: post #273
matheusmoreira wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 workin…

You cannot "use the government". I'm not aware of any countries where it would work like that. You can use the judiciary, which is independent of the government, and you can use it to go against the government the same way you can go against corporations.

The judiciary is literally one of the three powers.

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

#336

Post by ricardobeat »

reese_john wrote: post #256
____mr____ wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. > American companies are great to do business with. US officials involving themselves in your national market because they are unhappy with the market share of their companies in it, with the implicit th…

> US officials involving themselves in your national market because they are unhappy with the market share of their companies in it Just to clarify, for anyone who’s been paying attention to the matter, it’s clear that the true reason for that Section 301 investigation is not due to Pix stealing market share of MC/Visa. In fact, if you check Brazil’s central bank own data, Credit Card usage has not gone down since Pi…

Why would Brazil's government be on the side of American interests on a matter like this?

Pix is clearly mentioned as one of the topics for that investigation due to 'unfairness' and 'harming the competition'.

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

#337

Post by BrandiATMuhkuh »

melting_snow wrote: post #158
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…

> 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.

since the end of last year we have had instant payment in the EU. no more need for Mastercard/VISA. what I see missing is education.

That's why I'm telling each merchant I come bye to use it. super simple.

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

#338

Post by matheusmoreira »

gota wrote: post #311
matheusmoreira wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

>With pix, they are monitoring 100% of transactions now. First, I don't think they are. Second, good - they should have an _algorithm_ checking every transaction. MasterCard and VISA do it and do nothing for me; the government could catch all the money laundering that is the lifeblood of crime, or maybe just finally eradicate tax evasion, the necessary first step towards rationalizing our tax code and one of the core…

> First, I don't think they are.

100% of pix transactions are unconditionally sent to government bodies for monitoring. It's not an algorithmic "only if it matches some criteria" affair.

What they're actually doing with the data is anyone's guess. They could be doing anything. The tax department is no doubt going to be the first part of the brazilian government to adopt AI. Who knows what other creative uses they're going to find for it?

> MasterCard and VISA do it and do nothing for me

And we should be making it illegal for them to do that, not compounding the problem by piling on equivalent government functionality on top of it. The problem is supposed to be fixed, not replaced with a national version.

> the government could catch all the money laundering that is the lifeblood of crime

The optimal amount of money laundering, fraud, crime, are all non-zero. You can "catch all the money laundering" quite easily, just install a totalitarian state panopticon where everybody is guilty by default and constantly surveilled by an omniscient intelligence apparatus, problem solved.

You're going to need to accept some amount of crime if you want to have some semblance of freedom and basic human dignity.

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

#339

Post by trollbridge »

bleepblap wrote: post #279
trollbridge wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For comparison, one does not need need to get US tax ID number to use a Visa card.

Calling a CPF a "tax ID" is a bit misleading, much like calling an SSN "the way you get social security benefits". You can (even as a non-citizen) get one in a couple mins at the post office, and it's used for literally everything, including things like buying a SIM card or registering for some public WiFi hotspots.

Okay, that's quite a bit less bureaucratic than American EIN, ITIN, or SSN (collectively known as TINs).

How many digits/letters long is it? One problem with American TINs is the entire space is only a billion digits, so it's not possible to assign one to every person in the world. If we could add two more digits or make 3 alphanumeric, it would be a lot more feasible to do this, but that is basically impossible at this point.

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

#340

Post by benoau »

Schiendelman wrote: post #305
rpgbr wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have they said "we refuse" or could it be that they have other priorities that come first?

They were facing fines [1] for blocking usage of NFC a year ago and are still [2] fighting integration, so pretty explicit refusal.

[1] https://www.macobserver.com/news/brazils-antitrust-authority...

[2] https://9to5mac.com/2026/02/19/apple-accuses-brazilian-banks...

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