PIX, the Brazilian Central Bank’s instant payments system, broke a new record of daily transactions on Friday — surpassing the mark of 163 million instant payments in a single day.
It was the fourth time that daily transactions broke a new record in as many months. “The numbers prove the strong adherence of people and companies to PIX, a payment method launched in November 2020,” the Central Bank said on Monday.
In less than three years, PIX has become ubiquitous in Brazil — thanks to its absence of fees for P2P (between persons) and P2B (between persons and businesses) transactions.
Central Bank data shows that 35 percent of transactions in Brazil are currently made through the system. At the end of August, there were 153 million individual PIX users — with 12.7 million companies having keys, too.
PIX has become a go-to payment method for e-commerce purchases, jumping from 12 to 24 percent of transactions between 2021 and 2022, according to this year’s Global Payments Report. More importantly, PIX is expected to account for 35 percent of all e-commerce payments by 2026.
The system appears to be one of the few payment methods capable of challenging the hegemony of credit cards in e-commerce. According to Worldpay data, credit cards accounted for 39 percent of payments for online purchases in Brazil last year, 6 percentage points less than in 2021, despite the method’s 81 percent penetration in the country.
That threat should be even greater once Brazilians will be able to pay utility bills, subscriptions, and all types of recurring services through PIX, without relying on bilateral agreements between companies and banks or credit cards. The so-called “automatic PIX” system will be launched in October 2024, per the Central Bank’s most recent timetable.
As our Latin America Weekly newsletter showed, multiple Latin American countries are scrambling to replicate Brazil’s success, as part of a broader effort to digitize cash-based economies. But results so far have been mixed.“
Instant payments are becoming the norm in Latin America,” Wagner Ruiz, co-founder of Curitiba-based fintech Ebanx, told The Brazilian Report. “Even in countries in the region that are struggling, there is still room for substantial innovation.”
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