Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by bilekas » Sat, May 09, 2026, 3:15 PM UTC

janpeuker wrote: post #325

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…

Europe already has plenty of alternative card systems e.g. France's Cartes Bancaires (CB) and ironically Germany just last year turned it's Girocard/Maestro system off in favour of Visa/Mastercard; the problem is the banks in individual countries in Europe are not willing to give up their control in favour of a compatible standard.

> the problem is the banks in individual countries in Europe are not willing to give up their control in favour of a compatible standard

Well this is flat out wrong. Every countries banking system pays fees for processing visa and MasterCard. When there is a viable alternative in place with less fees, the bank like any money making enterprise will take it. Framing it as "countries" blocking it demonstrates you either have an agenda against EU or you're not sure how the EU works.

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

#362

Post by bilekas » Sat, May 09, 2026, 3:19 PM UTC

fakedang wrote: post #331

jangxx wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And your point is what? That nothing should ever be investigated, trials, or invested in until it has as you call it "consumer scale useage".

The EU is not perfect, but these kind of black and white comments highlight why it can be slow to align everyone to get on board with an idea. The empty vessle makes the most noise.

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

#363

Post by bilekas » Sat, May 09, 2026, 3:24 PM UTC

registeredcorn wrote: post #302

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…

> in reality it was because Visa and MC had taken over all the POS market Do you happen to have any insight on this? I mean, how is it that one or two companies can manage to squeeze everyone else out so completely? If two big players control Point of Sales (POS), shouldn't someone be able to come in and make a business out of underselling the competition? I would think that smaller overhead means smaller margins are…

> If two big players control Point of Sales (POS), shouldn't someone be able to come in and make a business out of underselling the competition

When your business depends on a customer focused payment, your primary goal is reach, more possible customers, bigger market. If a competitor or offering lower fees, it's still fees, of which those userbase might cross over. I hate this framing of the problem as a "well it's the shops fault"

It's short sighted limiting. And ridiculously oversimplified. Steam being dictated what they can sell being a great example thanks to pressure from the visa and MC duopoly.

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

#364

Post by subw00f » Sat, May 09, 2026, 3:28 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #236

subw00f wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

>It hasn't exactly demonstrated an ability to "deeply embed" itself into internet backbones the way the USA does

I’m not sure how that’s even relevant to the point I was trying to make which is: you are monitored by a foreign and openly hostile government through its privately owned collaborators. That’s worse than your own government using transactional data to monitor money laundering and tax evasion activities that detracts from your direct quality of life. And again, it’s naive to think Brasil has no control over the internet backbone in its own territory, you must not understand how it even works to say something like that.

> 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.

And yet here you are arguing against something that decreases the amount of potential bad actors who can gain direct access to your data. It’s the digital age for a while now, there is a general privacy tradeoff in anything you do online. If that’s a concern, use money. My issue with you is that, again, you seem to prefer to hand over your data to foreigners that have no incentive to use it for anything other than extracting as much value as possible out of your country AND with the additional criminally flagrant behavior of inflicting their interests on judicial and political decisions AND make your pay a 3 fucking percent charge over it.

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

#365

Post by fakedang » Sat, May 09, 2026, 3:43 PM UTC

bilekas wrote: post #362

fakedang wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And your point is what? That nothing should ever be investigated, trials, or invested in until it has as you call it "consumer scale useage". The EU is not perfect, but these kind of black and white comments highlight why it can be slow to align everyone to get on board with an idea. The empty vessle makes the most noise.

No, my point is to focus on one thing and get it done right. The right time to build an EU-wide payments processor was pre-COVID, as is the case with Pix, UPI, WeChat Pay, etc. If developing countries can build one over the course of a decade, what stopped the EU? Project managers and CV padding bureaucrats who really weren't serious about doing a good job. Compare that to the concerted efforts by the central banks in India and Brazil to actually work with the private sector to build out this system.

The EU has had the plumbing needed for this since at least 2 decades, yet has not managed to create this.

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

#366

Post by Pooge » Sat, May 09, 2026, 4:20 PM UTC

hocuspocus wrote: post #357

Pooge wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Switzerland there are a lot of cases where the bank will actually refund you if it was a fraudulent payment.

Hu, no? The most common scams nowadays involve social engineering to make people log into their online banking and transfer money, specifically because there's no way to revert transactions. The victims are typically 100% liable as they accept and authorize these. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtbihSwrKhk https://www.srf.ch/sendungen/kassensturz-espresso/kassenstur...

Fair enough, you're right.

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

#367

Post by bilekas » Sat, May 09, 2026, 4:25 PM UTC

fakedang wrote: post #365

bilekas wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And your point is what? That nothing should ever be investigated, trials, or invested in until it has as you call it "consumer scale useage". The EU is not perfect, but these kind of black and white comments highlight why it can be slow to align everyone to get on board with an idea. The empty vessle makes the most noise.

No, my point is to focus on one thing and get it done right. The right time to build an EU-wide payments processor was pre-COVID, as is the case with Pix, UPI, WeChat Pay, etc. If developing countries can build one over the course of a decade, what stopped the EU? Project managers and CV padding bureaucrats who really weren't serious about doing a good job. Compare that to the concerted efforts by the central banks i…

Again, that's a silly argument, when you're saying "It should have been done before" but at the same time saying "Europe spends way too much time and money on various Fintech pet projects."

> If developing countries can build one over the course of a decade

What countries are you talking about ? The EU countries have some, we also have instant IBAN transfers without any payment processor, we have PCI compliance in all banks to allow it. This feels like another example of you not knowing what you're talking about when you say 'The EU has had the plumbing needed for this since at least 2 decades, yet has not managed to create this.'.

The foundations to never rely on payment processors is already there, now we need to remove the dependancy on payments like visa and mastercard because of nescessity. And as someone above posted, it in progress, it will be done standardised across the entire EU, in Brazil, it's one country.

Edit : There was also never a demand for it because the EU reasonably assumed it could rely on US partners to cover areas in which the EU didn't focus. Only recently those priorities changed, politics has that effect here of dealing with the most pressing issues and not those that are lobbied for the hardest.

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

#368

Post by reese_john » Sat, May 09, 2026, 4:37 PM UTC

vitorgrs wrote: post #350

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…

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...

… and yet they both suffer from availability issues despite not having nearly the same scale as e.g. Nubank who uses AWS

Caixa was down yesterday: https://www.techtudo.com.br/google/amp/noticias/2026/05/caix...

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

#369

Post by reese_john » Sat, May 09, 2026, 5:26 PM UTC

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…

> Second, good - they should have an _algorithm_ checking every transaction. MasterCard and VISA do it and do nothing for me;

You are confusing transaction authorization done by card networks/issuers with the kind of fraud analysis that happens post settlement and requires correlating multiple transactions and accounts

> the government could catch all the money laundering

No, you don’t have enough information in transactions alone to identify all money laundering, specially the sophisticated kind.

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

#370

Post by reese_john » Sat, May 09, 2026, 5:51 PM UTC

gota wrote: post #317

pelasaco wrote: post #132

The only problem I actually face with Pix in Brazil is: Some stores only accept Pix and don’t want Visa or cash. As a tourist, you end up unable to access a lot of things because, well, we don’t have Pix. While I was in Brazil, some thugs with pistols came into a bar where I was. They forced people to send a Pix payment to a specific account, and their money was gone. In the credit card era, I guess the companies, in…

> While I was in Brazil, some thugs with pistols came into a bar where I was. They forced people to send a Pix payment to a specific account, and their money was gone. Sorry, don't mean to be rude, but your story doesn't track for many reasons. First, PIX keys are associated to formal bank accounts. If what you described happend, that account was blocked by the bank likely within the hour after the 'robbery'. And "st…

Have you ever worked in a financial institution?

This is such a common occurrence that the BCB had to impose a default $200 nightly limit for Pix trns between 8pm and 6am.

The way it works is, criminals use money mules, or stolen identities, to open legitimate bank accounts, then once the cash hits the account, they fan out the stolen proceeds to crypto rails or other money mules (“laranjas”)

BCB has been trying to solve this with MED 2.0 but it is still a duct tape over the real problem: rampant crime and fraud in Brazil

And let’s not dive into the digital bank heists that have been happening since the last year, when hackers have already managed to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from the financial system by exploiting Pix’s 24/7 network [0]

Such attack to the financial system would have been akin to a war declaration in serious countries, but crime is so widespread and normalized that Brazilians lowered their standards to accept these absurd situations

  [0] Hackers steal R$400m in attack on Pix-connected fintech: https://valorinternational.globo.com/google/amp/markets/news/2025/07/02/hackers-steal-r400m-in-attack-on-pix-connected-fintech.ghtml