In November 2020, Brazil’s Central Bank launched Pix. Three years later, it had become the most used payment method in the country. Not the most talked about, not the trendiest. The most used. And yet, when I sit in fintech conversations outside of Latin America, most operators still treat Pix as a curiosity. A local thing. Something interesting but not relevant to their world.
That’s a mistake.
Pix is a real-time payment infrastructure, built and regulated by the Banco Central do Brasil, that works 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Transfers settle in seconds. For individuals, it’s free. For merchants, the fees are a fraction of what card networks charge. And anyone with a bank account or digital wallet in Brazil can use it. The Central Bank of Brazil designed it from scratch as national infrastructure, built to modernize how 210 million people move money.
The results speak for themselves. By 2023, Pix already held 16% of e-commerce transactions in Brazil, and its compound annual growth rate is projected at 26% between 2023 and 2026. Credit cards still lead at 48% of LATAM e-commerce, but the distance between cards and Pix is shrinking quarter by quarter. Bank transfers overall are growing even faster, with a 38% CAGR over the same period. Something structural is shifting in how Brazilians pay, and the card networks know it.
Pix is one piece of a much larger infrastructure overhaul that most people outside Brazil have barely registered. Brazil’s Open Finance framework is one of the most advanced in the world. It allows consumers to share their financial data across institutions, which opens the door to better credit scoring, personalized financial products, and seamless payment experiences. Pix is the transaction layer. Open Finance is the intelligence layer. Together, they form the backbone of a financial system that is genuinely modern, not a legacy system being patched.
For any merchant or business looking to operate in Brazil, the implications are clear. A payment strategy that doesn’t integrate Pix is already outdated. And this isn’t just a Brazilian story. Across Latin America, digital wallets are growing 20% year-over-year. Argentina already leads the region with 30% of e-commerce spend going through digital wallets. Each country is finding its own path, but the direction is clearly away from cash, away from legacy card infrastructure, toward instant, account-based payments.
Other LATAM countries are watching Brazil closely. Colombia, Mexico, and Chile are each developing their own versions of real-time payment systems, many of them inspired directly by what Pix achieved. The playbook is being written in real time, and the countries paying attention are the ones that will move fastest.
I’ve spent years building licensed payment infrastructure in Brazil through LaFinteca, and what I can tell you is this: the infrastructure shift happening in this country is far from over. Pix Parcelado, Pix Garantido, and new credit functionalities built on top of Pix are all in development or early rollout. The system is evolving fast, and each iteration makes it harder for traditional payment rails to compete.
For those of us who understand this market from the inside, Brazil right now represents one of the biggest opportunities in global fintech. At LaFinteca, we are building for what comes next. The rest of the world will catch up. Eventually.
By Dmytro Rukin, CEO at LaFinteca
