alt Hacker NewsI worked in a bank in Brazil in the early 2000s. Bank transfers were always easy and relatively quick. At worst, transfers would happen overnight during a national event called bank compensation where all banks would sync up with the Central Bank.
Pix solved a bunch of problems and made all of the above quicker and easier, but Brazil has been at the forefront of banking systems for a long time.
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Man, It is perder of magnitude different. I've noticed it when I gave small money for a beggar using pix. It's really revolutionary.
And remember that credit card fees are greater in Brazil
Speaking of the forefront the UK has had interbank realtime payments (Faster Payment) since 2008. It also used to have something like Pix, i.e. bank account referenced by user's phone number called Paym from 2014, until it was discontinued due to lack of demand in 2023. Faster Payments is still operational.
Exactly, I worked in the SPB (https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistema_de_Pagamentos_Brasilei...) and was/is pretty well structured and well implemented.
We had TED, but it was not instant, nor was it free. It only worked on working hours and took a maximum of 1h, still better than American banks, though. QR Codes is also a big deal.
The deployment of PIX was also really well executed, if it took too much I'm 100% sure that Visa and Master would've made it worse. Being quick was a wise decision