Brazil

Pix is a central-bank-operated rail, not a scheme — and now over half of all financial transactions

Unlike NPP, FedNow or UPI, Pix is operated directly by Banco Central. The BCB sets interoperability rules, participation thresholds (all regulated PSPs above 500k customers must join), and interchange (zero for P2P, capped for P2M). In H2 2025 Pix accounted for 54.7% of all Brazilian financial transactions, with 42.9 billion transactions in the half — up 24.3% year-on-year. A single-day record of 313 million transactions was set on 5 December 2025.

Q1 2026 ABECS data: cards still growing, but contactless and credit lead the mix

Card transactions reached R$1.1 trillion in Q1 2026, up 8.3% year-on-year, with credit at R$810.2 billion (+12.8%) and debit declining 2.4% to R$236 billion. Contactless cleared R$504.8 billion in the quarter — 74.8% of in-person card spend. ABECS projects 2026 total card volume between R$5 trillion and a 9.5–11.5% growth range. The 2023 rotativo interest cap continues to push borrowers from revolving credit into personal-loan products.

Open Finance crosses 128M consents and remains the global benchmark in scale

Active consents reached 128 million as of January 2026, up from 62 million a year earlier. The regime covers banking, insurance, investments and pensions; Pix Automático (recurring payments authorisations on Pix rails) launched in June 2025 and combines payment initiation with data-sharing in a single consent journey. Phase 4 in-force since October 2024 extends the scope to insurance and pensions.

Live since June 2025, Pix Automático enables merchant-initiated pull payments over Pix rails with consent portability via Open Finance. Subscription merchants (utilities, streaming, insurance) can route around card MDR and chargeback economics. Nubank activated Pix Automático across its 115M Brazilian customer base in March 2026, with sub-24-hour merchant onboarding against the four-to-six weeks typical for card-based recurring.

BCB published the Pix Internacional technical specification in April 2026, with Argentina (Transferências 3.0) and India (UPI) as confirmed first-phase counterparts and live operation targeted for Q3 2026. The BIS Agorá project provides the wholesale-FX settlement layer. PSPs that own FX-to-Pix reconciliation primitives for remittance and B2B flows enter ahead of the rollout.

BCB shifted Drex's first-phase architecture to a centralised model in 2025 and confirmed in Q1 2026 that with Pix in place there is no obvious retail use case. Phase 2 tests 13 use cases including digital-asset transactions and smart contracts; participants include BTG, Itaú and Santander. Drex's value sits in wholesale tokenisation of bonds, receivables and real estate — not retail CBDC.