Brazil’s central bank, the Banco Central do Brasil, launched Pix in November 2020 and made it free for individuals to send money to each other. Businesses pay 0.33% to accept it, against 1.13% for a debit card and 2.34% for a credit card. By 2022, Pix accounted for 29% of the country’s non-cash transfers, more than any other payment method.
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Why the BCB built its own rail
The central bank set out to cut reliance on cash, widen access to financial services, sharpen competition in a banking sector a few large lenders dominated, and modernise the settlement system underneath everyday transactions. Angelo Duarte heads the BCB’s department of competition and financial market structure. He says moving cash around a country the size of a continent is expensive, and cutting that cost was one aim. Even his own staff were “surprised by the speed of adoption,” he says.
At a coconut-water stall in a São Paulo street market, customers can pay with cash, a card, or Pix. Cashier Kleber de Jesus produces a QR code on the card machine instead of swiping anything, and says the option is “faster, easier and fails far less” than the alternatives.
How the fees stay low
Pix runs on its own settlement system, called SPI, sitting on a national address directory called DICT that the BCB also operates. Instead of an account number, a payer’s app looks up the recipient’s phone number, email address, or a randomly generated ID in DICT to find where the money should land. Participation is mandatory for any institution with more than 500,000 accounts. Smaller institutions join voluntarily, and almost all do. By the end of May 2023, 799 firms were active participants, and only 34 of those were bound by the mandate. Banks handle about 57% of the annual transaction volume, payment institutions and fintechs another 39%, and credit unions the remainder.
For a taxi driver or a street vendor, Pix typically works out cheaper than a wireless card machine, and the machines are less reliable besides. Building it cost the BCB $4 million, and running it cost $8 million in 2022.
How fast it caught on
By May 2023, more than 140 million people, about 80% of Brazil’s adult population, and 13 million firms had used Pix. Between them, they moved more than 3 billion transactions a month, at an average of about $88 each. The system reached people who had never sent an electronic transfer before: 71.5 million individuals who had made no electronic credit transfer in the year before Pix existed were using it by December 2022. Pix’s transaction volume was already close to five times debit and credit cards combined. Only India’s UPI moves more transactions on a real-time payment system worldwide, according to an ACI Worldwide report cited by the FT.
Growth kept climbing after that. By the first quarter of 2026, monthly transactions reached almost R$3.4 trillion, equivalent to roughly a quarter of Brazil’s annual GDP. Cash use fell over the same years, from 43% of the population in 2019 to 6% five years later, according to a Google survey.
The fraud that came with the reach
An instant transfer moves as fast for a scammer as for anyone else. The dominant attack, known in Brazil as golpe do Pix, uses cloned WhatsApp profiles or fake customer-service calls to talk a user into authorising a transfer themselves. The BCB’s defences include a default limit of R$1,000 on transfers made between 20:00 and 06:00, a mechanism that lets banks freeze and return funds when fraud is reported, and mandatory alerts for first-time recipients. None of it stops a user who knowingly authorises the payment. In July 2025, criminals broke into the software company C&M and stole more than R$540 million.
Why other countries are watching
Sixty-five foreign regulators now have information-sharing deals with the BCB covering Pix. A 2026 report by the consultancy W Fintechs describes Pix as public infrastructure rather than a product. Daniel Ruhman, chief executive of the regulatory proxy Cumbuca, called it “a blueprint for what is possible.”
