By Marcela Ayres
BRASILIA, July 21 (Reuters) - Brazil's Pix, one of the world's most successful instant-payment systems, has become a flashpoint between Brasília and Washington as the Trump administration aims to protect U.S. firms from the model's growing appeal in dozens of countries.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer named Pix, operated by Brazil's central bank, as one of the barriers to trade that he cited to justify fresh 25% tariffs on imports from Brazil taking effect this week.
"We're
not asking Brazil to get rid of Pix," a senior Trump administration official said. However, Washington is pushing to avoid a situation in which "Pix gets special treatment simply because it's owned and operated by the government," the official said.
Brazilian officials have long argued the criticism is aimed at protecting U.S. credit card companies. USTR documents say that Brazil's practices "may undermine the competitiveness of U.S. companies engaged in digital trade and electronic payment services."
The tensions underline the growing threat of disruption posed by government-built payment infrastructure models such as Pix to credit card companies' decades-long dominance of global payments.
Pix enables real-time transfers between accounts through banking apps, combining free person-to-person payments with significantly lower costs and faster transactions for businesses, bypassing much of the traditional card-payments chain.
At a news conference last week, where senior officials denounced the U.S. tariffs as politically motivated, central bank chief Gabriel Galipolo dismissed complaints about Pix's impact on card revenues and market access as absurd.
He said the number of people using credit cards had increased in absolute terms because Pix pushed so many Brazilians to open bank accounts, and that Pix was a public service, not a competitor.
"It would be kind of like saying that creating basic sanitation hurt the revenues of those who own water trucks," he said.
The central bank launched Pix in 2020 and it quickly became the dominant payment method in Latin America's largest economy, overtaking card transactions by its third year of operation.
Pix now accounts for more than half of all transactions in Brazil by volume and has about 170 million users, or 80% of the country's population.
While similar services exist in several countries, including India's UPI and FedNow in the United States, none has matched the explosive uptake of Pix.
Through the first half of this year, Brazil's central bank signed agreements to share information about Pix with 65 international counterparts, from rich economies such as Germany and Canada to emerging-market peers such as South Africa and Turkey.
"Pix is really a model and the direction everyone is moving toward," said Galipolo.
YEARS OF LOBBYING
Mastercard and Visa have both warned investors in their securities filings that networks such as Pix could challenge their business.
The Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), a Washington-based trade group for Visa, Mastercard, Meta and other tech companies, has urged USTR for several years to level the playing field for its members in Brazil, according to its website.
It argued Pix should be subject to a more competitively neutral regulatory framework, and that international payment firms should enjoy equal treatment and access under Brazil's payment-system rules.
Still, it remains unclear why U.S. President Donald Trump's administration decided to take action now.
Visa, Mastercard and ITI did not respond to requests for comment.
Abec, an industry group representing payment companies in Brazil, said the existence of multiple payment schemes and models — such as the credit and debit card ecosystem and Pix, among others — was highly beneficial for consumers and society.
INTERNATIONAL APPEAL
Card transaction volumes have continued to rise in absolute terms after Pix helped bring more than 70 million Brazilians into the financial system. But credit cards' share of transactions has fallen to about 15% from roughly 20% before Pix's launch, while the share for debit cards has dropped to around 10% from about 26%.
Pix and instant-payment systems like it also have room to grow beyond Brazil's borders.
Private companies have already created infrastructure for Brazilians to use Pix on trips abroad, including to the United States, and for tourists to use Pix in Brazil.
There are also signs that instant-payment systems from different countries could one day interconnect, adding to unease in Washington amid talk in major emerging economies of reducing dependence on the U.S. dollar.
In recent public comments, however, U.S. officials have focused on criticising Pix for what they describe as a conflict in the Brazilian central bank's roles as operator and regulator.
In a 2023 paper, the International Monetary Fund also contrasted governance of Pix with similar systems in China and India, where operation and oversight are split between entities.
Asked whether the Trump administration had proposed removing Pix from central bank control, Galipolo said it was difficult to understand exactly what the U.S. was demanding. He argued that the current structure ensures Pix remains a public payments platform accessible to all eligible market participants.
The U.S. criticism has given Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva an opportunity to rally support around a system that has become widely popular among small merchants and informal workers as a low-cost way to accept digital payments.
"No one is going to change our Pix," Lula wrote on social media on Friday. "It's public, it's free, and it will stay that way."
(Reporting by Marcela Ayres in Brasilia; Additional reporting by Michelle Price and David Lawder in Washington; Editing by Manuela Andreoni and Nia Williams)
