Latin America's Central Banks Establish Digital Payments Used By Hundreds of Millions (msn.com) 34
175 million people in Brazil now use its instant-payment system "Pix", developed by the country's central bank for real-time payments using QR codes or keys, and American Banker notes that the central banks of Argentina and Costa Rica also have developed their own widely used digital systems for instant payments.
Latin America has been able to build up sleek and effective payment systems in record time because it is not held back by legacy payment technology that isn't built for instant money movement. In the likes of the U.K., U.S. and Europe, payment systems are built on infrastructure that is often decades old. The process of building new systems is therefore incredibly operationally complex. Money must continue moving, so these systems can't just be "switched off."
Emerging markets, such as those in Latin America, did not have to contend with legacy technology on the same scale. Many of these communities were cash dominant until recently, due to the high fees associated with card usage and the lack of banking infrastructure in rural regions. However, while many people didn't have a local bank on their corner, they did have mobile phones... Through these digital channels, money moves instantly, via account-to-account transfers, QR codes and mobile wallets... Beyond this, real-time and traceable digital payments generate valuable cash-flow data that can transform credit underwriting for small and medium-size businesses, or SMEs. Historically, many SMEs in emerging and cash-reliant markets have struggled to access credit due to a lack of documented transaction histories, audited accounts or formal credit records...
Mexico is now poised to be the next success story. In Mexico, a third of people are unbanked, but 96% of the population owns a mobile phone. This creates the perfect launchpad for a digital-first payment system that can reach those historically excluded from traditional banking systems.
In fact, something already changed in 2025. Bloomberg reports that for the first time, digital payment transfers in the U.S.-to-Mexico remittance corridor exceeded cash transfers (with physical pickup locations like Western Union), according to Mexico's central bank. It's part of a Latin American market "worth more than $160 billion a year, roughly $62 billion of which goes to Mexico."
And Mexico's digitalization efforts will continue, according to the country's president, who said at a March banking conference that digital payments will now be encouraged for gasoline and tolls.
Emerging markets, such as those in Latin America, did not have to contend with legacy technology on the same scale. Many of these communities were cash dominant until recently, due to the high fees associated with card usage and the lack of banking infrastructure in rural regions. However, while many people didn't have a local bank on their corner, they did have mobile phones... Through these digital channels, money moves instantly, via account-to-account transfers, QR codes and mobile wallets... Beyond this, real-time and traceable digital payments generate valuable cash-flow data that can transform credit underwriting for small and medium-size businesses, or SMEs. Historically, many SMEs in emerging and cash-reliant markets have struggled to access credit due to a lack of documented transaction histories, audited accounts or formal credit records...
Mexico is now poised to be the next success story. In Mexico, a third of people are unbanked, but 96% of the population owns a mobile phone. This creates the perfect launchpad for a digital-first payment system that can reach those historically excluded from traditional banking systems.
In fact, something already changed in 2025. Bloomberg reports that for the first time, digital payment transfers in the U.S.-to-Mexico remittance corridor exceeded cash transfers (with physical pickup locations like Western Union), according to Mexico's central bank. It's part of a Latin American market "worth more than $160 billion a year, roughly $62 billion of which goes to Mexico."
And Mexico's digitalization efforts will continue, according to the country's president, who said at a March banking conference that digital payments will now be encouraged for gasoline and tolls.
You really had a great thing going on. (Score:4, Insightful)
This, and million little (and colossal) shifts like this are why every American patriot, as in, person who has any actual love for and devotion to USA, or even simple opportunists eager to utilize the worldwide advantage being American gave them, should be blood curdling angry at the current governmental kleptocracy in power (and I do /not/ even mean MAGA exclusively).
Perfect example of a formerly world wide order that provided every single account holder of almost any American bank with worldwide privilege of ease and access that people from other countries would generally have to pay at least a little bit extra to receive.
And like so many things the world just let Americans have it, because the deal still wasn't that bad for the rest of them. But now it will be lost, as pretty much everywhere in the world, systems independent on USA's infrastructure, physical, legal and commercial, are being built, because the deal is garbage now. There's no more promise of stability. No more impression of benevolence and cooperation, with just oh so little exploitation on the side.
It will be the same with military spending. Yeah, rest of NATO might be compelled to spend more on their military, but they gonna think twice on whom they buy from. It will be the same with culture, with science, with software and with diplomacy.
I guess every empire is bound to eventually find a way to fuck it all up, but it is bizarre to see how few people actively enabling and supporting the fucking up are even remotely cognizant of what's going on in front of their very eyes.
Re: You really had a great thing going on. (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
You're pointing the finger in slightly the wrong direction. It's not the fault of the political system as such, this is because we have allowed our society to be captured by the psychopaths who rule Corporate America. In their unending greed and eternal search for quick easy money and ever more power they have de-industrialized the country, gutted research and development into new technologies, stunted the migration to renewable energy and sustainable agriculture, and on and on. This financial tech is ye
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
You're pointing the finger in slightly the wrong direction. It's not the fault of the political system as such, this is because we have allowed our society to be captured by the psychopaths who rule Corporate America.
It's never "the policies we voted for". It's always "the other guy is fucking me over". You people are so fucking pathetic.
In their unending greed and eternal search for quick easy money and ever more power they have de-industrialized the country,
What a crock of shit. The richest companies in this country are companies that you VOLUNTARILY throw money at, hand over fist. Not a single one of them is extracting money from you, without your active consent. Microsoft never forced you to buy their OS. They did some shady shit, I'm not gonna absolve them.. But it was never not possible to bypass those cunts entirely. Apple was always
Re: (Score:1)
See, your issue is that when the other "right wingers" lied to you about who the "lefties" are and what do they want, you fell for it.
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Oh, yeah, we "voluntarily" give them money. Is this before, or after they drive every other company out of business, or they buy them, leaving us with few choices?
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I'm not even sure that I'm pointing a finger at anyone "at fault"; the people at direct, specific "fault" are very clearly benefiting beyond most people's wildest dreams and as long as there's someone willing to mash the "betray" button, they're eventually gonna find their way to wherever it happens to be in any given environment by the simplest of gradient descents.
What baffles me is the ultimate girth and heft, and... density of the group that seems to legitimately believe they did search for what's the b
Re: You really had a great thing going on. (Score:3)
It is often a preliminary to producing results though. Not necessarily peacefully, and not always improvements, but results nonetheless. A number of revolutions come to mind.
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Even if America hadn't become unreliable, this is a good move. Social democracies should look to protect consumers and smaller businesses from this kind of corporate tax on transactions, by implementing their own payment systems with low fees and fair terms.
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Perfect example of a formerly world wide order that provided every single account holder of almost any American bank with worldwide privilege of ease and access that people from other countries would generally have to pay at least a little bit extra to receive.
And like so many things the world just let Americans have it, because the deal still wasn't that bad for the rest of them. But now it will be lost, as pretty much everywhere in the world, systems independent on USA's infrastructure, physical, legal and commercial, are being built, because the deal is garbage now. There's no more promise of stability. No more impression of benevolence and cooperation, with just oh so little exploitation on the side.
The irony is, despite Visa and Mastercard holding a near complete global duopoly over card transactions, it was US cards that had the most trouble being used overseas simply because US banks refused to adopt the EMV standard that every other country in the world adopted. I was recently in Colombia and Americans still complain about how much their cards get rejected, never been an issue for me with either UK or Australian cards as they're fully compatible with EMV as are Colombian banks (so the cards are 100
US should have had this already (Score:1)
Story fails to clarify what's truly new in this (Score:3)
Consumers in African countries have famously had mobile banking that skipped legacy system for many years now, maybe even a decade. European consumers have long had instant payments with no fees. So far as I remembered, practically the only country where consumers still don't have this is the US, thanks to its crazy patchwork of banking systems with embedded corporate and anti-consumer interests. Just like the US is the only country where checks are still in regular use, and paying with a card can still sometimes only be done with a signature(!) instead of chip-and-pin or contactless, etc. I remember going to Chicago for HIMSS a couple of years ago and not being able to pay for pizza in a big restaurant with Apple Pay. Like so much of US life, it's just antiquated.
The net new stuff from consumer / small biz perspective is push-to-pay (theoretically exists in some countries but rarely used), the zero cost payment system for micro merchants, and payment inside messaging. All the rest of the net new is behind the scenes architectural, and is great, but not needed to achieve the same benefits.
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The problem is not the incumbent technology per se. These "sleeker" systems can be implemented every bit as easily in the US as elsewhere. The problem is economic. Merchants already invested money into the incumbent systems, which they have to continue to support to maintain their current revenue. The new technology imposes additional costs for minimal revenue because most consumers will slowly ramp up with the new technology. If the new technology could be implemented with zero additional cost to the
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If that were the only issue, you would expect no meaningful difference in takeup between the US and European countries, but that's not the case. Those who run the infrastructure in the US have economic interests in preventing it improving that do not exist in other countries, and the capability of exploiting US fragmentation of regulation across states to resist progress.
Europe does have a system (Score:5, Informative)
In the likes of the U.K., U.S. and Europe, payment systems are built on infrastructure that is often decades old
Not entirely correct, European countries do have an instant payment systems and their merger is now developing into a solution as large as Pix. One difference is it is a federation of systems and does not have a single marketing name.
Southern Europe started different national systems (from European Payments Alliance, EuroPA), interoperating between Italy (Bancomat) / Spain (Bizum) / Portugal (MB Way) / Andorra / Poland (Blik) / Norway (Vipp) / Sweden (Vipp) / Greece (IRIS).
Western Europe started a system called Wero (from European Payments Initiative, EPI) which serves France / Belgium / Germany / Luxembourg / ... https://epicompany.eu/media-in... [epicompany.eu]
The Wero system and the EuroPA national systems have now announced interoperability https://epicompany.eu/media-in... [epicompany.eu]
The plan is to enable cross-border payments between Wero and the EuroPA systems in 2026, and online purchases in 2027 https://www.20minutos.es/lainf... [20minutos.es] (in Spanish).
Now reaching 382 million inhabitants (or 130 million bank users) in 15 European countries, the merged offer is comparable to Pix.
Note that the national systems e.g. Bizum or MB Way are already very very popular in their respective markets and enable locals to exchange money instantly and pay online and at physical shops (without Visa/Mastercard involved). It is used daily by tens of millions, it works great.
My point of discussion is the European-wide merger that makes the whole thing comparable to Pix in reaching hundreds of millions on a continent.
Australia (Score:2)
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How popular is it? Is it very widely used? Is it clearly on its way to being the primary payment method in the nation? Or, is it yet another obscure payment system fragmenting the space with options and further limiting the likelihood of widespread adoption?
Slop (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
"This article has so many inacurate statements, it is not worth reading."
We know. We never RTFA.
You must be new here, welcome.
Just some additional details (Score:4, Informative)
So which should a nerd use? (Score:2)
Since this is news for nerds, is there a simple way to use these European or latin American gateways SaaS / AIaaS type services? Or is everything dependent on a merchant account with the local Visa gateway or Google Pay? Not a fan of crypto stuff, just curious about the state of OSS payments and whether usable for time based or token/API based billing.
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at least the MBWay, to use, all you need is a national bank account and a phone, register that phone in the bank app or via the bank site or via ATM code and share your phone number to receive/send payments.
PIX, AFAIK, it is similar
for the rest of european payments, should be mostly similar
you can get payment terminal and associate with those payments or use Stripe, Antom, HiPay, PayPay, EasyPay and many other online payment services and enable and associate the mbway in there
So if you have mbway, you can
Central Control (Score:2)
How does this not stop the government from shutting off your access to your money when they don't like what you're writing or protesting?
Re: Central Control (Score:2, Troll)
You can still use cash or any other method. Actually, in Brazil, every business is required by law to accept cash.
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Mexico is going away from cash.
https://bigbendtimes.com/2026/... [bigbendtimes.com]
Other countries/central banks want to do away with cash too.
Look To India (Score:3)
Look to India for "leadership" in digital payment. Brazil's Pix is very similar to India's Unified Payment Interface(UPI). India's UPI is very widely used and with India's massive population size, I can't imagine that there is a bigger digital payment system.
The U.S does have Zelle, Venmo, Paypal, and other digital payment systems. And lets not forget Google and Apple in that space. But, these various services are all launched/owned by corporations resulting in a very fractured space and far to many systems to not be a pain in the ass. UPI, Pix, and others are singular systems from each countries central bank making them much less fractured and perhaps trustworthy. Maybe.
It is very interesting though to see how these systems spread like wild fire in some places while they have near zero adoption rates in other places.
You can read more about UPI here: https://www.investopedia.com/t... [investopedia.com]
You can see it in use here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Also watch. (Score:2)
This one is a more recent, fascinating, and engaging watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
US gov is threatening Brazil because of Pix (Score:1)
Since the start of Trump's term, the US have been complaining and threatening Brazil because of Pix.
Their argument? Since people can make direct, instant payments, from their phones for free, it disturbs US card companies business in the country. UNFAIR!
https://restofworld.org/2025/p... [restofworld.org]
Just as recently as last month, Rubio himself publicly complained about it.
But there's more! BRICS are planning a digital currency to trade between them and Trump is pissed about it, threatening huge tariffs if the countries