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

elciudadano.com

341–350 of 397 posts

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

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wise remains one of the worst professional support experiences I've ever had at my company and would highly advise people not to use them.

In contrast, I had great support the one time I contacted them. Have used them in business and personally across a number of different accounts with no problems.

The problem with these fintech companies, is that they work great right up until you randomly get banned.

They then they decide to keep your money for months. At that point, have fun getting it back unless you send a letter from your lawyers.

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

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need a brazilian tax ID to use PIX, I've used it from MercadoPago from another country and there are a lot of options to use it besides MP.

Well .. How did you register to MercadoPago? I never was able when I was in Argentina (end of last year). It also asked me for some official IDs in Argentina which is even harder to get than a CPF (or probably impossible as a non-resident, I didn't bother at that point)

With MP you need an official ID, but there are some crypto apps that have pix and allow to register with a passport.

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

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It can, in fact there is even an open standard for that:

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

By the way credit card companies do a lot more than Wero, SEPA or any other similar instant payment solution (e.g. chargeback).

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

#344
post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need instant, free SEPA transfers around the clock. We have? SCT inst has been rolled out almost everywhere > Switzerland is not part of SEPA We definitely are. Transfers in EUR from/to CH IBANs use SEPA rails. CHF accounts can also send or receive EUR transparently (usually at a bad FX rate, but it just works). > I don't understand what they solve. [...] > I always say that the day Trump decides to block Visa/M…

> We have? SCT inst has been rolled out almost everywhere That is true; I should have said "EEA" or "countries supporting IBAN". > We definitely are. Transfers in EUR from/to CH IBANs use SEPA rails. CHF accounts can also send or receive EUR transparently (usually at a bad FX rate, but it just works). Yes, which is exactly my point. We need it to work for CHF as well. Instant payments are not the norm and in fact UBS…

> A payment should be a bank transfer. Anything more complicated is just something that is to be exploited by middle-men.

I disagree with that. Payments (especially online and contactless ones) should have some form of buyer protection, chargeback and a way to handle fraudulent transaction, lost / stolen cards, etc.

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

#345

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…

Baby steps. If AWS starts unfairly exploiting its market position the way visa and mastercard do then brazil will move pix to another provider

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

#346

Seems fairly logical for any large country to create something like this. Visa/MC is nice but allows the US to apply undue pressure to individuals. E.g. the US applied financial sanctions on ICC officials in the EU resulting in them losing access to Visa/MC credit cards and banks even those are that are purely EU based.

> Visa/MC is nice but allows ... Not sure how it is overseas - but in the US, the #1 problem with Visa/MC is the huge percentage that they skim off every transaction. Businesses running on tight profit margins often give a discount if you pay with cash instead.

I think the fees are on order of 1-3% depending on your risk and business type. Certainly an issue but it's mitigated a bit by the decreased costs of going cashless. I.e. cashless operations avoids theft by employees; overhead for stocking, counting, and handling money; reduced insurance due to less chances of robbery; etc.

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

#347
post #218
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"we are going to go back to how people used to travel 50 years ago: with a lot of USD bank notes hidden in your hotel room or elsewhere ..." Who did that? Most people except for criminals and refugees used traveller's cheques: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveller%27s_cheque I think some banks, like AmEx, still issue them.

People did that? I took one look at the fees and ... "no thank you", and took cash.

Sure. It might have been different in other places but when my folks took out traveller's cheques in the nineties to travel to e.g. the caribbean the 'cost' in the form of a slightly worse currency price wasn't a serious issue, in part because ATM fees/exchange rates were way steeper than piecemeal exchanging the cheques for local cash. Getting a bank to reissue cheques was easier than replacing a card too.

Some destinations were probably cash friendly, i.e. no one would scope you out for theft, but that's not the kind of travel I had in mind. I'm actually not that familiar with that kind of travel, I've mostly travelled on a budget or to less touristy places.

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

#348

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). It's not ideal, but you can use Wise to pay using Pix and India's UPI. You simply transfer the money from your local bank account to Wise and they transfer to whatever Pix you tell. It's almost instant. Meanwhile, there are talks about integrating these systems. This is the obvious long-term game, a clear threat to Visa and MasterCard. Right now…

tbh even cashback these days might be worthless. It need to be a considerable amount. Because most things you buy, you have a discount when buying with Pix or money...

What still make credit cards strong in Brazil it's installments though...

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

#349
post #344
post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have? SCT inst has been rolled out almost everywhere That is true; I should have said "EEA" or "countries supporting IBAN". > We definitely are. Transfers in EUR from/to CH IBANs use SEPA rails. CHF accounts can also send or receive EUR transparently (usually at a bad FX rate, but it just works). Yes, which is exactly my point. We need it to work for CHF as well. Instant payments are not the norm and in fact UBS…

> A payment should be a bank transfer. Anything more complicated is just something that is to be exploited by middle-men. I disagree with that. Payments (especially online and contactless ones) should have some form of buyer protection, chargeback and a way to handle fraudulent transaction, lost / stolen cards, etc.

> buyer protection, chargeback and a way to handle fraudulent transaction

There is; it's called a bank.

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

#350

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…

It was not Pix being down, though. This is about banks using US cloud providers. The issue here was with private banks even.

As far I remember, Banco do Brasil and Caixa - both public banks, didn't went down, because they use Brazilian owned servers...

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