Digital payments have gone viral in Brazil

FOR YEARSQR Brazilians had little incentive to abandon cash. Wiring 50 reais ($10) to a friend would set you back an extra 16; swiping a credit card, 2% of the cost of your purchase. For e-commerce firms this made doing business particularly cumbersome. Customers wanting to buy something online, but not wanting to incur the costs of a digital payment, could choose instead to print a payment slip (), take that slip to a shop or post office, and hand over the cash. The problem for e-commerce firms, however, was that not everyone who printed a ended up going to a shop to fork over the cash—meaning that many transactions were never completed.Then came Pix, an instant-payments system operated by the central bank. Launched in November 2020, it has transformed the way Brazilians make payments. The platform allows consumers and merchants to send and receive money via a code, without having to share details of their wallet, fintech provider or bank. In April around 118m people used the platform—or more than two-thirds of Brazilian adults. In the last quarter of 2021 they made a staggering 3.9bn payments. Already Pix has surpassed debit and credit cards as the most popular method of payment in Brazil. One in five transactions now takes place on the platform’s mobile app.