Elemar Júnior

🇧🇷 Brazil’s Pix payment system now processes more transactions than Visa and Mastercard combined 🤯 According to Banco Central do Brasil, Pix handled 224+ million transactions in a single day, overtaking the combined domestic volumes of Visa and Mastercard. Let’s put that into context. Pix launched in November 2020. In under five years, it became the default payment method for more than 150 million Brazilians, roughly 70% (❗️) of the population. It’s: • Instant • 24/7 • Free for consumers • Near-zero cost for merchants • Mandatory for large banks That combination changed everything. For decades, Brazil’s merchants paid 2–5% per card transaction. Pix removed most of that friction overnight. For a street vendor in Recife or a small business in São Paulo, the math became obvious. But this isn’t just about transaction volume. Pix brought an estimated 71 million unbanked or underbanked Brazilians into the digital economy. That’s one of the largest financial inclusion shifts in modern history. And strategically, this is even bigger: A government-built rail is directly competing with — and outscaling — private global card networks. This raises a fundamental question for the global payments ecosystem: If public, low-cost, interoperable infrastructure can scale this fast… what does that mean for the long-term economics of interchange? Brazil may not just have built a payment system. It may have built a blueprint. Together with 🇮🇳 India’s UPI, this might be the most successful payments story of the past decade. What do you think? Will more central banks follow this path?