In July, I was fortunate enough to attend the 2025 Global Payments Week (GPW) in Brasilia, Brazil (July 7-8), organized by Banco Central do Brasil (BCB) in collaboration with the World Bank and the Bank for International Settlement (BIS) Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructure (CPMI). This dynamic event offered an excellent platform for discussions on frontier financial topics—including tokenization, digital assets, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and regulatory technology (regtech). It also provided a valuable networking opportunity with central banks and regulators from Africa and beyond, as well as select representatives from the private sector.

One of the highlights of GPW 2025, however, was the amazing learning opportunity it provided on Pix, Brazil’s inclusive instant payment system (IPS)—also known as a fast payment system (FPS). When Pix was launched during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020— as an open retail payment system available to all registered financial and payment service providers in Brazil—it enabled an almost immediate boom in digital payment adoption. The willingness of BCB’s team to share their journey with delegates at GPW 2025, including several African countries, delivered key lessons from which we can learn. As the Deputy Governor for Licensing and Resolution, Renato Gomes, stated during his opening speech: “Pix has transformed daily life in Brazil … and this success is the result of strong collaboration between the BCB team and all participating banks and fintechs.”

The BIS estimates that over 100 countries have access to an FPS.[1] In Africa in particular, the growth of IPS has been dynamic. AfricaNenda Foundation’s State of Inclusive Instant Payment Systems (SIIPS) in Africa reported 31 live IPS in Africa in 2024.[2]

Instant payments make it possible for individuals and businesses to push payment transactions through digital channels and for the funds to reach the intended recipient in seconds, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. The experience of Pix Brazil offers three key lessons that can inform the development and scale of inclusive IPS across Africa.

The journey of Pix (owned and operated by BCB), began with regulatory reforms, a decade before its November 2020 launch. Early in 2013, the National Congress of Brazil enacted Law 12.865/2013 on payment institution and payment scheme licenses, regulation, and oversight. In addition to other regulatory changes, this helped create the foundations for inclusive instant payment success.

Setting the right priorities from the start, and adjusting them over time, was also invaluable. Hence every four years, BCB carries out a survey on payment instrument usage and market challenges to ensure it is solving the right market problems. Understanding the current payment landscape helps build a compelling value proposition for future adoption of IPS. In 2018, BCB conducted a holistic landscaping exercise to identify gaps in the payment ecosystem, and to understand the pain points that consumers, merchants, and payment service providers (PSPs) face.

Success is further secured when the process is inclusive of key stakeholders whom the IPS will serve. To this end, BCB proactively engaged a diverse set of stakeholders in the planning stages with the creation of a working group in 2018, which later became the permanent Pix Forum.[3] The vision for Pix Brazil was clear: ‘…allow payments anywhere, to anyone, for anything, at any time, and in an instant.’[4]

In Brazil, BCB invested $2 million in public funds to build Pix as the payments pillar of the country’s digital public infrastructure (DPI) with a vision of serving all Brazilians. In-house technical capacity was already high in central bank due to its experience building the country’s Real Time Gross Settlement System (Reserve Transfer System – STR) in 2002.

BCB co-created the rule book for Pix with the payment industry and the civil society. It enabled inclusive governance and design principles through a consistent and transparent stakeholder engagement strategy that included regular requests for input. The Pix Forum that emerged from BCB’s initial stakeholder engagement efforts includes four working groups focused on business, technical requirements, messaging, and security. Participants include representatives from several sectorial associations such as banks, non-banks, PSPs, consumers, businesses, and government agencies.

Technology choices can determine how willing participants can take part in an IPS. Connecting to, integrating with, or migrating to a new technology can incur significant costs for bank and non-bank IPS participants. The schemes can help tip the scales with technological choices that make it easier for participants to integrate, and central banks can further drive participation, and therefore scale the system, which lowers prices. On the technology side, BCB built Pix on open standards with strong security protocols and made standardized APIs available to third-party payment initiators. The platform is built to enable incremental changes for affordable long-term innovations and scalability.

BCB also made an early policy choice of requiring mandatory participation of all banks and PSPs managing over 500,000 checking accounts or pre-paid accounts.[5] This ensured that Pix was available to over 90% of account holders in Brazil from Day One. As of December 2024, there were 35 mandatory participants on Pix and 843 voluntary participants. Every participant is connected to the settlement system directly or indirectly through a sponsor for liquidity management.

Finally, Pix is built on user-centric principles. All participants must adhere to minimum user experience requirements and there are no fees for any Pix transactions for individuals, which helps highlight the time and cost savings of digital payments compared with branch transactions. Significant investments were made to develop the Pix brand as well as to communicate and educate consumers on its value proposition. This helped increase Brazilian consumers’ trust in digital payments. In addition, anti-fraud mechanisms are in place to protect consumers, including a special refund mechanism to block funds linked to fraud complaints.

By 2024, 22% of all payments in Brazil were made in cash, down from 77% in 2019.[6] Pix processed 63.44 billion transactions valued at USD $4,49 trillion in 2024, representing 226% of the country’s GDP; 96% of all adults and 84% of businesses used Pix in 2024.^[7] Pix is an amazing case of a country believing in DPI’s potential to transform its development trajectory and deliver inclusive outcomes for consumers, businesses, and the government and taking steps to realize it. The recipe for success lies in mandates and smart incentives for banks and PSPs to join and promote Pix, allied with incentives for end users, including free transactions for individuals and affordable acceptance costs for merchants. Both are enabled by an agile and reliable platform that can evolve easily in an innovation friendly and risk-proportionate regulatory environment. Africa can benefit from adopting these lessons as it evolves its IPS ecosystem. As stated by Breno Lobo, Head of BCB’s Pix Team, “Pix has achieved its public policy objectives—such as increasing competition and efficiency in the retail payments market, reducing the use of cash, and promoting financial and digital inclusion—well ahead of expectations. The leadership of BCB and the direct involvement of the private sector and the civil society was key to these results.”

I am looking forward to expanding on these lessons in November during the Eswatini launch of AfricaNenda Foundation’s 2025 SIIPS in Africa report, and sharing insights on the amazing progress Africa is making on inclusive instant payment systems that lead transformative change through digital public infrastructure.

References:

[1]https://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt2403c.pdf

[2]https://www.africanenda.org/en/siips2024

[3]Central Bank’s role

[4]https://www.labrys.one/public/research-publication/pix-gold-standard

[5]Participants

[6]https://www.labrys.one/public/research-publication/pix-gold-standard

[7]https://www.labrys.one/public/research-publication/pix-gold-standard