Does Brazil Have An App That Can Upend Digital Finance?

By John P. Ruehl

News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Tues. Oct. 21, 2025: The Trump administration’s July 2025 decision to have the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) investigate Brazil and the “attacks on American social media companies as well as other unfair trading practices,” followed by the launch of 50 percent tariffs, drew immediate headlines and caused predictable market panic. Washington has also placed sanctions on Brazilian officials in response to Brazil’s prosecution of its former president and Trump ally, Jair Bolsonaro.

Tensions remain high even after Trump’s October 2025 call with current Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and the country’s foreign minister arriving in Washington days later. While U.S.-Brazil relations have long fluctuated between strain and cooperation, Trump’s latest moves suggest his administration sees Brazil less as a partner and more as a trade and political rival, despite the U.S. maintaining consistent surpluses with the country.

Among these punitive actions, the inquiry into Pix, Brazil’s groundbreaking fast payment system, introduced in 2020, stands out. Developed by the Central Bank of Brazil, Pix lets individuals and businesses send and receive money instantly, at any time, via mobile apps, QR codes, or account keys. Transfers between individuals on Pix are free, and all licensed financial institutions in Brazil are required to adopt it.

Pix’s rollout during COVID-19, when no-contact payments were essential, rapidly accelerated its adoption. Around 175 million people use it, and Pix “now accounts for nearly half of the country’s financial transactions,” according to a September 2025 New York Times article. The platform handles everything from restaurant payments and employee wages to billion-dollar financial transactions. Maintenance costs in 2024 were estimated at nearly $5 million, with another $8 million in investments shared across the central bank’s “entire computing infrastructure,” according to data obtained through Brazil’s Freedom of Information Act by Valor International.

Before Pix, money transfers in Brazil were dominated by the “walled gardens” of international card networks, like Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and domestic payment processors. Sensing disruption, several of Brazil’s major banks, which “dominate” the financial industry, warned of Pix’s cybersecurity and fraud risks, and certain fintech firms also pushed back, seeing it as a threat to their fee-based business models.

These fears proved justified after revenue from traditional transfer and processing fees declined following Pix’s rollout. In 2022, then-Central Bank President Roberto Campos Neto defended the system by arguing that nationwide adoption would lower cash-handling costs and increase transaction volumes, while creating new opportunities for financial innovation.

Pix did level the playing field for many smaller firms, which could finally compete with Brazil’s major banks without the burden of nationwide branches and ATMs. Many Brazilians were previously tied to employer-selected banks that they rarely used. Pix’s interoperability across all financial institutions eliminated transfer barriers, allowing workers to open additional accounts and shift money to take advantage of better rates and services.

On October 20, 2025, in Brazil, the President of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, participates in the ceremony at the Planalto Palace to launch the Casa Brasil Reform Program. (Photo by Ton Molina/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Nubank, for example, is a fully digital bank that grew from 17 million customers in 2019 to more than 100 million by 2024, making it the world’s second-largest digital bank by number of customers, according to the Economist. It is also the largest digital bank by market evaluation, according to Global Finance, and Pix’s digital-first financial environment was central to its rise.

Millions of people from Brazil’s vast informal economy, often in rural areas and favelas with limited banking infrastructure, have also gained access to the formal financial system. Once reliant on cash, bartering, or rotating credit groups, they can now send and receive digital payments seamlessly, broadening financial inclusion through public infrastructure.

Global Comparison

Fast payment systems exist worldwide. However, Brazil’s Pix stands out for its rapid mass adoption, massive user base, international standing, and high degree of central bank control. It builds on regional experiments by other central banks, such as Mexico’s Sistema de Pagos Electrónicos Interbancarios (SPEI), established in 2004 as an interbank transfer system. SPEI has slowly modernized, adding the payment method Cobro Digital (CoDi) in 2019, which made it more smartphone-friendly. However, the system charges fees to users and has not achieved the same scale or ubiquity as Pix.

Costa Rica’s mobile payment system SINPE Móvil, launched in 2015, is also operated by its central bank. It offers free transfers up to certain amounts, with small fees for larger transactions. While widely used, it mainly serves small-value transactions.

Thailand’s PromptPay, introduced in 2017, was developed under the direction of the Bank of Thailand but is run by National ITMX, a company jointly owned by major Thai banks. India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI), launched in 2016, is similar. Operated by the nonprofit National Payments Corporation of India (NCPI) under central bank oversight, UPI accounted for roughly 50 percent of India’s real-time payments volume between 2024 and 2025.

Russia’s Faster Payments System (SBP), developed by Russia’s central bank, came online in 2019 and was created in response to Visa and Mastercard restrictions following Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea and subsequent Western sanctions. The SBP has stabilized Russia’s payments amid economic consequences from the war in Ukraine since 2022, including Apple Pay and Google Pay’s exit. Domestically dominant, SBP is vulnerable to cyberattacks and is limited internationally, mostly to the post-Soviet space, though expansion efforts are ongoing.

China’s Alipay and WeChat Pay, in turn, dominate the country’s transfer market. While both are private companies, they remain under strong government oversight. The People’s Bank of China’s digital yuan, meanwhile, provides a public option.

In most Western countries, major payment systems are typically managed by consortia of established private banks. Europe’s introduction of SEPA Instant in 2017 allows instant euro transfers, while the European Central Bank’s TIPS platform provides the infrastructure. Both systems, however, remain voluntary and are not universally adopted. To improve usability and unify its fragmented national systems, the EU launched the Wero Project under the European Payments Initiative in 2024, but adoption and scale of the project are also scattered.

Modern U.S. banking payment systems, like Zelle, alongside tech platforms like PayPal, Venmo, and Apple Pay, show the U.S. domestic market’s strong growth in recent years. Yet Pix has disrupted the wave of U.S. tech expansion abroad. Meta’s attempt to launch WhatsApp Pay in Brazil shortly after Pix’s rollout was temporarily blocked by regulators, allowing Pix to secure early dominance.

The U.S. Federal Reserve recognized the need to modernize and launched FedNow in 2023, drawing inspiration from Pix. But its reach is still constrained by voluntary participation, regulatory hurdles, and resistance from major banks. Pix, meanwhile, mandated early participation from all licensed financial institutions, speeding up standardization and innovation with fintech and private apps.

Brazil’s central bank has been exploring cross-border uses for Pix since 2023 and is actively looking to collaborate with India’s UPI. The biggest signal of Pix’s international reach came in July 2025 with the announcement of International Pix, launched by PagBrasil and Verifone, allowing Brazilians to make Pix payments in the U.S. with real-time currency conversion.

Pix’s notability goes beyond consolidating its money transfer networks. As the nonprofit publication Rest of World notes, Washington’s concerns surrounding Pix also stem from losing access to purchasing behavior and consumer transaction data once dominated by American systems, now retained in-house by Brazil’s central bank. Fintechs like Truther also let users trade stablecoins and deposit them through Pix, bypassing the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) and complicating U.S. financial monitoring.

Brazil’s efforts prove countries can build domestic payments systems quickly and with global reach. By reshaping banking without destabilizing it, Brazil has positioned itself as a world leader, hosting Global Payments Week 2025 in July 2025 with the World Bank and the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI-BIS).

“Outside the country, it [Pix] has drawn praise from leading economists, who have gone as far as to call it the future of money,” stated the NYT.

Information obtained by Valor International under Brazil’s Freedom of Information Act shows that in 2025, the country’s central bank discussed Pix with more than 50 countries. Eighty percent of those interactions involved central banks, with the rest being a mix of international financial entities and organizations.

Washington has been left trying to continue developing its own fast payment system and, as the Trump administration’s recent measures indicate, attempting to restrict efforts by other countries. The July 2025 USTR investigation report “alleged a ‘competitive advantage’ granted to government-developed digital payment systems,” according to Valor International, which Brazil notes the U.S. is pursuing with FedNow.

With Brazil continuing to insist on its monetary sovereignty, its Pix system has already reshaped domestic finance. Banks must operate under equal rules, and a private tax on monetary movement has been largely eliminated. Pix’s risks to the public include greater visibility of transactions, allowing for easier government taxation, monitoring, and freezing of funds. New fees could always emerge, and digitized payment systems are still vulnerable to outages, as Spain’s blackout in April 2025 showed.

Still, the more that Washington targets these payment systems, the stronger the incentive for other countries to strengthen their own models. The Bank for International Settlements Project Nexus is helping to connect fast payment systems that could eventually help form a global network, while rival monetary systems are slowly emerging—including BRICS Pay, launched in 2024, it is designed to bypass SWIFT and enable local-currency transactions among members, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Much of this momentum stems from Pix, through which Brazil continues to assert growing financial sovereignty and leverage.

EDITOR’S NOTE: John P. Ruehl is an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C., and a world affairs correspondent for the Independent Media Institute. He is a contributor to several foreign affairs publications, and his book, Budget Superpower: How Russia Challenges the West With an Economy Smaller Than Texas’, was published in December 2022.

Credit Line: This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.