Wherever and whenever with Pix

Issue 425 | 9 December 2022

As a reader of Payments:Unpacked you will know that payment systems are vital to a country’s economy and play a remarkable role in ensuring that payment for the goods and services consumed are efficient, safe, resilient and friction-free.

Given the popularity of last week’s “Don’t worry about it, I’ll Tikkie you” briefing we will now take a quick look at the Brazilian Pix instant payment system - a special thank you to Gaurav Sharma for providing the basis of this briefing.

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Pix : Wherever and Whenever

The Brazilian Central Bank describes Pix as an easy, fast and affordable experience for end users and businesses, delivering a safe and versatile solution for payments and transfers - describing Pix as a “wherever and whenever” payment solution.

Pix is an instant payment method developed by the Central Bank of Brazil that enables transactions to occur in less than 10 seconds, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – including weekends and holidays.

By selecting Pix at the checkout page, users can either scan a QR Code using their smartphones or copy and paste a Pix code into their banking or digital wallet apps. After that, all they need to do is check the receiver’s information and confirm the action.

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What is Pix?

Within the Brazilian instant payment (IP) ecosystem, Banco Central do Brasil (BCB) created Pix, the Brazilian Instant Payment scheme that enables its users (people, companies and governmental entities) to send or receive payment transfers in few seconds at any time, including non-business days.

By transferring funds between transactional accounts Pix is a payment method that tends to have a lower acceptance cost because its framework works with few intermediaries.

Announced in the summer of 2019 and fully operational by November 2020, Pix has become the most used payment option in Brazil.

After 12 months (October 2021) it was reported that the Brazilian Central Bank had built a mobile payment system with 110 million users, processing more than 6 billion transactions with Bloomberg labelling the Pix system as ubiquitous:

One year ago the Pix platform didn’t exist. Now half the population uses it, showing just how quickly adoption of digital payments can spread.

Bloomberg (October 2021)

By January 2022 Pix was used by 71% of the population in Brazil and on its second anniversary (30 November 2022) the system broke a new daily transaction record with 99.4 million Pix operations were carried out in just one day.

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How does Pix work?