Pix tap-to-pay will drop its daily R$ 500 cap in Brazil

Brazil’s Pix by proximity lets users pay by tapping a phone or smartwatch to a terminal, using NFC (near-field communication) and a connected digital wallet. The relevant bit for PSPs: the rail is already huge, and the central bank is now removing one of the few practical frictions left in the tap-to-pay flow.

1. Launched in 2025, Pix by proximity works in a way that looks very familiar to anyone who has handled contactless card payments: the customer brings a phone or digital watch close to the payment terminal and confirms the transaction in a digital wallet that has joined the scheme.
2. At the moment, the feature is available on Android devices, including Google Pay and Samsung Wallet. iPhones do not support it because Apple still does not allow digital wallet apps to act as Payment Transaction Initiators (ITPs), which is required for this type of transaction.
3. To activate Pix by proximity in a wallet, the user has to link their bank account to that wallet, in the same general way cards are linked for card payments. During the linking step, the user is redirected to their bank or other account-holding institution to confirm the authorization, and that linking only needs to happen once.
4. Once the account is linked, payment is straightforward: choose Pix at checkout, tap the phone to the terminal, check the payment details, and confirm. That removes the need to scan QR codes or type in payment details manually.
5. Pix as a whole is already the dominant payment utility in Brazil. Last year it processed R$ 35,36 trilhões in transfers. In November 2025, when Pix marked its fifth anniversary, Renato Gomes, director of Financial System Organization and Resolution at Banco Central, said the country was close to having essentially all adults using the tool.

For high-risk merchants and PSPs, the important part is not the tap-to-pay gloss. It is that Pix keeps absorbing payment volume in Brazil while getting easier to use at the point of sale, including for small businesses that used to struggle to collect payments online or in person. The system also sits at the center of a fresh dispute with the United States, where the government says the Banco Central acting as both regulator and operator gives Pix an advantage over competitors such as Mastercard and Visa.