Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

Finance can be fast if wanted, and I don't think there' s a deliberate delay in Wise's animation.

In my country, we have a similar system, and before my bank sends me a push notification about the outgoing transfer, the push notification for incoming transfer pops up for most of the time. The delay between push notifications rarely goes above 2 seconds.

Ours has an upper limit to prevent abuse of the system, but you can't beat instant, actually.

The parking ticket machine might make things deliberately slow because the printer needs to warm up or something.

Maybe it needs up to 5 seconds to warm up if it's in deep sleep, so splitting this into three 2s periods provides the least frustrating user experience.

As soon as you need to deal with real hardware things always start to get complicated.

Even if it's free, doesn't it have to put the ticket cookie in some database?

80 countries have instant/real time payment systems today [1], and the Bank for International Settlements is working on cross border interoperability [2].

Cryptocurrencies will likely never go away, and will remain in use for certain use cases from a cross border value transfer perspective, similar to gold; either the token moves or the ownership is updated. More interesting is offering digital wallets for a single or basket of currencies to anyone you can remotely identity proof in the world (similar to nsave [3]).

[1] https://www.volt.io/real-time-payments-world-map/

[2] https://www.bis.org/about/bisih/topics/fmis/nexus.htm

[3] https://www.nsave.com/ | https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/nsave

You have bizarre logic here. For example, in a topic discussed about GPUs, someone would say that it's not possible to run databases on GPUs, so GPUs don't have any chance of succeeding.

> How much do you trust your government with your money?

Do you trust crypto companies? Mt. Gox, FTX, Bybit…

Do you know that crypto companies must follow government rules, regulations, and laws? Russians were banned from using many crypto exchange platforms. China has strict rules for its citizens. You can buy and sell crypto in Brazil, but you must use only Brazilian reals.

Pix isn't global, but no one government person outside of Brazil can block this system.

MasterCard, Visa, Amex, and UnionPay work worldwide, but only a few countries regulate them, can block their usage, and can use data for tracking and statistics.

Pix is free to use, so no one needs to pay an additional "tax" to MasterCard and Visa (it's about 3%).

Google and Apple cannot say that if you want to pay, you must use only our devices.

> Now, try to use Pix outside of Brazil

Now, try to buy ice cream from street vendors using any crypto coins.

Pix proposition is very valuable for governments, as it is the best way of controlling transactions, inside the country and cross-border.

To you second point, I think the pix penetration/popularity proves that the majority of the people trust the government for that. There are 2 key reasons for its success: It was mandatory for Banks to adhere to the system and there are no fees for using it.

Once multiple countries have their own PIX, they just need to build a federation structure to connect them and allow cross-border transactions.

Crypto-currencies have their place with people who don't trust the government, want to speculate and/or simply want to do tax evasion, but they are not and probably never will be mainstream as a transaction medium.

> How much do you trust your government with your money?

When you use Pix, your money is not in custody of the government. The money goes to/comes from a standard commercial bank, just like a wire transfer. What the government (Central Bank) does is just the infrastructure for moving money between bank accounts.

The point about not being a global standard is valid, though. Although there are initiatives in progress to connect similar instant payment systems from different countries as other users have noted.

try to use Pix outside of Brazil

Try to use cryptocurrency for anything other than a few very specific transactions at a number of places in the world so small that it's a rounding error.

Still cryptocurrencies as-is remain relevant

And somehow less relevant than cash.

I can take cash from any country in the world to my local bank, and deposit it into my account. I can get a dozen different foreign currencies at my local branch in minutes, and almost any other currency in the world can be delivered to me by FedEx the next morning for a flat $10 fee.

I can take cash to any other country in the world and get it converted into the local currency, whether that's paper or digital in almost any city.

Crypto is great if you do a very few, very specific things in a vanishingly small number of places. But if I'd tied my finances to crypto instead of cash, I'd have been stuck many times in foreign lands.

> How much do you trust your government with your money?

Money is (for the purposes of this conversation) created and guaranteed by the government, and regulated by law, so I think it’s a little weird to not trust the government with my money.

How are you paying for a cab with crypto while travelling? For international payments, cards like Wise is simple and it works. You raised question about currency and the govt that manages it. The same question is true for most crypto as well; extreme volatility is not good for a currency.

> it's not even used in other Mercosur countries.

You can pay with Pix in Paraguay since the largest privately owned payment processor implemented it and it's available within all payment terminals (POS) across the country.

The government of Paraguay also runs a similarly good system called SIPAP, that is replacing card payments because it's faster and free to use.

Nearly every non-western country has it's own e-cash type system.

Everything from m-pesa in Kenya to Gcash in the Philippines to PromptPay in Thailand to Alipay in China to SGQR in Singapore to MPay in Oman....

The pattern is that these systems are nearly all fully centralised, require ID, zero privacy, usually government sanctioned, and not cross border.

>Does it work internationally?

Does crypto? You may have heard of this thing called "tariffs" lately. Even purchases of software licenses are tariffed in Brazil[1]. The average person purchasing goods with crypto is just going to ignore this and several similar laws.

If you say crypto works to transact internationally, keep in mind: so does TF2 hats.

1: https://www.machadoassociados.com.br/en/2021/05/brazilian-fe...

> Does it work internationally? Does it send USD as well, or only the real?

There are neighboring wallets (like Belo in Argentina) that support it, and I believe tourism will drive even more integration over time.

Only real afaik, although there have been some thoughts to integrating some neighbours to the system. Right afaik it works in shops popular with Brazilian tourists in the Southern Cone through some workarounds.

I was expecting China to be totally cashless when I went last year. While everyone accepts digital payments, almost everyone also accepts cash just fine.

I wish the homeless in London did this, I'd happily give a few pounds here and there if it were easy to. Back when I had cash on me at all times, I would think nothing of it, just toss a coin. Now in our cashless society, I found myself at a loss to do anything about the people suffering in front of me

> I've even had homeless people ask me for Pix instead of change on multiple occasions.

Sounds like WeChat Pay. It's been years now that beggars in China only carry QR codes.

I saw a guy at a freeway offramp in north Texas with a Venmo (?) address scrawled on a piece of cardboard.

Here in Sweden we have Swish which seems to be very similar (just send money to anyone with a phone number/QR Code), but Swish is a private company, not government.

Relatedly, most company payments here, including water/electricity/etc bills, are paid using a system called Bankgiro, which is also a private company (and you can pay Bankgiro bills using Swish, of course).

And even the de facto national electronic identity system, BankID, is developed and provided by a private company. It is used to login to your bank as well as most government systems and any company can use it for login (which most Swedish companies do).

So, it differs from the Brazilian model in that all services are provided by private companies, not by the Government. Not sure which is better, to be honest. On the one hand it's hard to trust a Government like the Brazilian one given its history... on the other hand, trusting a private company even for public services seems wild: what if they go bankrupt, get sold to foreign investors, started using shady business practices??

Europe has SEPA payments. They are very fast and reliable, and separate from Swift.

I'd hate to see a system like that where I live, because the government will abuse it. We've already seen Canada freeze bank accounts of protestors, and US officials put protestors on the no fly list.

In the case of Brazil, besides QR codes, you can also make payments using the user unique key, which can be its phone number, social security number, email or a random generated key.

QR codes are problematic. First of all, you can’t really verify it with your naked eye. It can take you to a fake site that looks just like the original. Using phone numbers is vastly superior.

> removing the profit incentive

You're far too optimistic. The current administration is trying to work itself out of a major economic crisis and there's nothing they would like more than to tax the crap out of every single Pix transaction.

UPI is great in terms of UX, but I don’t think it’s super reliable – especially big public banks go down all the time. The UPI base service had multiple incidents in the last 1 month too.

The main difference is UPI is decentralized whereas Pix is centralized to the central bank of Brazil.

100% this. My (BR) state have a weather service¹, it's amazing. What people don't realize, it's that the service isn't just made for normal people see if is gonna rain, it's that the service is fundamental for agriculture and farmers. So they have radars, frosts alerts, specifically tailored to farmers as well.

It's also used to give alerts to electricity companies, etc...

Their weather prediction, it's just way better than any other service.

There's also national service, run by CPTEC/INMET, but they are lacking funding IMO...

[1] https://simepar.br

I'm in NZ and actually prefer the Norwegian Govt weather site www.yr.no, which is about as accurate as our local one, easier to use and has no adverts.

This is exactly what has been playing out in the Netherlands the past couple of months: the weather institute (KNMI) released their own weather app that is functionally the same (in some cases superior) as the commercial apps that want your consent to track and serve ads.

The commercial parties sued KNMI, even though they use the public data provided by KNMI. Luckily they lost: https://www.dutchnews.nl/2025/02/knmi-weathers-legal-app-sto...

And as a bonus, there was some Streisand Effect when this was in the news, and people have been moving to the KNMI app in droves.

I believe in Germany the national weather service in fact rolled out such an app, but was then stopped by a court because this counted as unfair competition with private entities.

In the US, just bookmark the NOAA projection maps and your local zip on weather.gov. you don't need an app.

Switzerland has this for weather - government data, projections up to a week in advance. Of course no ads, tons of info ie on PM2.5, pollen, avalanche risk in mountains etc.

That's exactly why NOAA in the US is under attack. Conservatives see $$$ potential if they privatize it.

> For instance: weather apps. Private sector ones are just a vector to track and sell your location data, and they rely on government data anyway.

Or you do it like we do here in Germany and take the dumbest route you can imagine.

We had a very well working publicly funded weather app from DWD (Deutscher Wetter Dienst). The primarily purpose of this app was to warn from extreme weather conditions, but it also included an ad free (because publicly funded) and rather accurate forecast.

Then a private entity sued claiming that the DWD app also providing weather information is unfair competition for private competitors. The won in court and now the publicly funded DWD app has a paywall for a previously free feature.

Says the national from a country that’s had at least 12 different government orders in its time, more than any other G20.

You really like government, you just can’t figure out what it ought to be or how to keep it.

That seems like a very broad statement. Citation?

> the issue is that our government in particular is incompetent

Our federal government is huge and our state governments are small. Precisely the opposite of how the founders configured it. This is part of the problem.

The states need to band together and develop a cooperative solution and then push it upwards to the federal level.

This is a lot easier than centralized planning and management of an entity the size and scope of the US. We have a lot of offshore territories and two states. This complicates things more than people care to admit.

> Is american culture just less tolerant of it?

Yes I think so. These flashy gamified things are considered kitsch. Designers here prefer lots of white space.

Because we have a Northern European streak in our heritage that is heavily against all that flashy casino style crud

i wish i was not sympathetic to those arguments - and i used to not be, but then i actually worked in the federal government. perhaps local governments can efficiently provision services but the feds are handicapped in so many different ways it would be quite challenging to untangle.

realistically, the workforce that was hired around sorting through hundreds of thousands of bureaucratic paper documents in the 70s/80s is not the same workforce that can really build new products and the feds are mostly the former.

>For decades the American people have been told that anything the government touches will be expensive, inefficient, and lead to a more taxes. Private sector knows best, and all that.

Do you have some counter arguments?

Brazilian Pix is free though, at least for the time being. IMO the biggest thing is not the money behind it, but the ability to track individual payments. Even that, I prefer the government to have that information, than some shady owner of a private company

> Payment systems take huge fees

That is the monopoly cost. UPI is free for both payee and payer. Whatever it costs banks to operate it is covered by reduced cost of dealing with cash/consumer.

Fast, free, and frictionless payments allow the economy to run better. That's better for the government and the people. Only corporations like Visa and Mastercard lose.

It's the Economist, this kinda thing is just their weird party line

How so ? While it is P2P protocol, the network is pretty centralized.

UPI is owned by NPCI(gov entity) and runs on top of IMPS both the networks are strongly regulated by RBI the central bank.

There is fair amount of regulation and KYC/ AML requirements before an app/service gets direct access to the network and even then it can be pretty challenging. WhatsApp struggled for years to get UPI integration .

Holding money in a wallet has even more regulations than merely transferring it .

Payment networks tend to centralize by their nature. I see pix or UPI as competitor to Mastercard or VISA , they have proven it is possible to run a network far cheaper than claimed

Why do you assume a government-run monopoly is inefficient?

You should try to take a train in Switzerland sometime. Its government run and I guarantee you will be mind blown over its efficiency.

You would think, but is it in practice? In the Netherlands (and I believe many/most other countries), practically all non-cash payments are handled by either Visa or Mastercard. Technically a duopoly, but that's not a huge improvement either.

Yet we, a developing "third-world" country, have a better functioning payment system than the US, where it takes days, or even weeks, for a wire transfer to land, and you pay a huge amount of fees for that.

Cases in point:

- To transfer money to a broker, I need to pay around $5 in transfer fees via ACH or wire

- I want to change the custody of my stock market assets from one broker to another, and it will cost me $75 to move $60 worth of shares. Meanwhile, in Brazil, this process is free in every broker.

This take is at best outdated and at worst disingenuous. Brazil’s democracy was threatened by an actual authoritarian with oligarchical ties during Bolsonaro’s presidency, but its institutions resisted, and he was democratically removed. Now he, his minions, the aspiring oligarchs, and the insurrectionists who attempted their own “January 6th” are facing real consequences — including jail time.

You can’t say the same about the US and its actual oligarchs.

(The corrupt part is true)

Where did you get this idea of a 'very corrupt authoritarian oligarchy'? Brazil is not much different from any other democracy and is far less oligarchic than Trump's USA. Also, PIX is managed by our independent central bank."

Hum, sorry, no. It's a very corrupt liberal oligarchy.

WhatsApp Pay is available today in Brazil. The official reason for blocking the launch was missing paperwork, but word on the street at the time was that it was to favor Pix. This is all mentioned in the Retuers article. The reasons for favoring Pix are left for one to speculate. You say national security, the other says financial surveillance and control over the population. Time will tell.

These systems are not a direct alternative to Visa/Mastercard. They offer no credit and give no fraud protection and no way to revert transactions (ie you can never get your money back once you send it).

Although they can replace a lot (most?) of existing transactions that are currently done through credit cards, there is still a place for them.

> Tangentially related, I've heard talk of EU alternative to VISA and Mastercard, which I also believe is the right direction.

There is Wero, I guess similar to Pix as an alternative for instant payment like PayPal, but it's meant to be used with your bank account and not a lot of banks support it.

i hate this expansion of national security justification and securitization rhetoric - whether it is the US justifying tariffs or deportation or Brazilians justifying no fair play under the law or trying to jail presidential candidates.

It's an interesting topic for study. Being the first to launch wasn't the only factor, but certainly an important one - WhatsApp Pay is available today, but it's nowhere near as popular as Pix. That's why I mentioned it. With that being said, I don't think people need "saving" from choosing to use a service. It's not certain that WhatsApp Pay would really take off as much as Pix did. I also don't think one should be thankful for having one monopoly replaced by another (in the sense of market dominance, you can still use alternative payment methods). Imagine instead of WhatsApp Pay it was WhatsApp itself. Meta is no saint, but at least messages are E2E encrypted. How would GovApp look like? As mentioned in the article, Pix has every transaction go directly through the central bank, as opposed to going through commercial banks like traditional payment methods. It may provide great usability, but also concentrates power and risk, as written in The Economist. So far there is no indication this power has been used in any malicious way, or that any significant breach occurred, but the infrastructure for that is there, and governments change. That should at least be in one's mind, if one values some kind of personal financial freedom.

Good to hear your words loyalty and patriotism, dear citizen! I will contact your local commissar and make sure he increases your social credit score by 5 points.

But we must also be realistic if we want to win against our eternal enemy Eastasia, and admit that Facebook coin would never be a monopoly because Visa, Mastercard and cash exist.

WhatsApp does handle UPI though. Were they denied in the past?

Isn't that what any other payment system and most of the banks around the world are - a foreign company with billions of dollars in charge of payment system in a country.

VISA, Mastercard, HSBC, UnionPay, ICBC, Santander... Or is this all Brazilian technology?

The difference is that Meta is privacy data hoarder, not that it's a foreign company. And it's not "in charge of countries payment system", because that's pretty-much impossible, but "one of the payment systems in the country".

actually, foreign capital and foreign investment is good - and fair play before the law facilitates that.

securitization and anti-globalization makes us all poorer, worse off, and more prone to conflict. lawfare is an addictive drug and can lead to serious outcomes, as history in Brazil shows any number of times - like even with the current president.

they do physically print the money (at some cost) . And they can easily generate revenue from a payments system, if they want to (which they will at some point, of course)

Creating digital currency can be as simple as incrementing a number or adding a ledger entry. Creating paper currency can be quite expensive. There are tens of billions of US notes in circulation.

Both are "profitable", as there is more money in the end, but governments are eating real costs to manage the physical bills.

I have never heard a single person complaining about BankID really. The only downside is the huge risks, especially for older people. We basically took control of an elderly family members bankid to avoid them being scammed.

This is something they really need to work on, just add an optional extra layer or cool-down, to slow everything down. You dont necessarily HAVE to have your transactions be immediate, waiting a few days would have been fine in our cases.

> What's even worse, since BankID is private, there's no individual right to get it

Nothing stops people from making it a right.

Brazilians have that right. Everyone can get a free checking account with transfers and Pix at every bank. They still try to sell us "service packages" but the idea of paying a fractional reserve bank any amount of money is just stupid if not abusive. They should be paying us for the privilege of having our money deposited into their reserves, not the other way around.

Yes BankID is the real MVP of digital systems, I heard some talks about the EU making one valid for the whole block. Hopefully it will fix all the countries.Everything is done through BankID in swedish-only institutions.

Put house on sale? bankid. Book a doctor appointment? bankid. Login to bank? Bankid. Open bank account? bankid. Sign contracts? bankid.

Heck I moved my pension (like a lot of money) to a different institution by just using BankID. Didn't have to call/email anyone, the process took 5 minutes (with about a month to actually process the transaction).

I live in Switzerland - TWINT has other differences as well. To start, its settlement is not immediate as Pix's. As you point out, it is also not standardised.

Revolut is simplifying this, also in Switzerland. You checkout with the "Pay with Revolut" option. It's instant, magic and safe. You don't need to copy card details, just authorise the push notification.

I have also used it on airline websites, Aer Lingus and Wizz Air.

Literally everyone uses Swish in my experience. Even idiotic criminals.

We "had" to get swish (and a debit card..) for our 12 yo daughter because cash is just not very usable here. Although the CC is still used more than swish, but for transfers between persons, or smaller companies swish is very common.

It is still not the same as credit cards, credit card fraud protection doesn't require any sort of legal process.

Also these kind of limits can also be put on credit (and debit) cards.

It's now quite trivial to connect a foreign credit/debit card to Wepay, and it worked flawlessly on a recent trip. (This was very much not the case only a few years ago.)

We had the same in The Netherlands. Several weather apps that requested to share all your data with a bunch of partners, had ads, etc.

Then our national weather institute launched their own app without tracking or ads, and the existing weather apps all immediately joined up to sue them over it. Thankfully they lost the case.

https://www.rechtspraak.nl/Organisatie-en-contact/Organisati...

Another variant is the "playing at shops" privatization, such as seen in the UK railway system. Lots of different, fragmented entities, none of which naturally corresponds to a train service as a whole, obfuscating where the money goes (it's the train landlords or ROSCOs).

more than 50% of the rural brazilian population doesn't hav internet access (that's 36 million people) [0]

the central bank admin. director says physical money is still the base of brazilian transactions [1]

[1] https://exame.com/economia/dinheiro-em-especie-ainda-e-a-bas...

[0] https://www.ecommerceupdate.org/noticias/brasileiro-esta-dei...

most places i visited (remote rural places like districts of > 300 people up to big cities) have a rechargeable card system where you can buy at any terminal

some buses in the surburbs of big cities only accept cards nowadays and you can recharge it online in 3 minutes (ofc if you are a citizen... brazilian goverment websites is a huge UX pile of shit; police, mail etc.)

Yeah there was a big thing where the government announced some new rules relating to reporting transactions to the local IRS equivalent. I believe that's the main reason for the fall in Pix usage.

It's only tax evasion if the activity results reportable income. Just assuming everyone, who does not use your favourite cashless platform, is a criminal, is bad marketing.