Brazil’s Pix and Europe’s TIPS move into assessment phase for cross-border transfers

The Central Bank of Brazil said last week that the assessment phase for a possible interconnection with Europe’s TIPS (TARGET Instant Payment Settlement) has started. If the project gets past the usual pile of technical, legal, and commercial questions, the pitch is straightforward: faster, cheaper, and more transparent cross-border transfers between Brazil and Europe.

1. The core of the setup would be end-to-end payment orchestration. In practical terms, a participant in Europe — such as a bank or payment provider — would send an instruction to TIPS, TIPS would forward it to Pix in Brazil, and Pix would pass it on to the final bank or payment provider.
2. Marco Massarenti, a payments consultant at the ECB, said the goal is to support the G20 roadmap for more efficient cross-border payments, strengthen European payments’ strategic autonomy, and keep pace with innovation in the sector.
3. Massarenti also gave the kind of fee language high-risk operators know too well: for remittances and cross-border payments in less commonly used currencies, charges “can reach 10% or more.” The target, he said, is to bring that cost below 3%.
4. Brazil is not the only jurisdiction in the ECB’s queue. The institution is currently assessing links with three other infrastructures: India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the Swiss system, and Nexus Global Payments.
5. The ECB says the connected infrastructure is intended to be cheaper than the current setup, but originator costs will still exist and fee arrangements will continue to be defined commercially between clients and banks. Massarenti stressed that banks are not being removed from the equation: financial institutions and payment service providers in both jurisdictions will still be needed to complete the last mile of the transaction.
6. One more point that matters for anyone selling payments into high-risk verticals: settlement speed is part of the plan. Massarenti said cross-border payments are currently fragmented and can take several days to reach the other side. The aim of the new infrastructure is to make the process instant, while the ECB and the Central Bank of Brazil work through technical interoperability, functional specifications, legal aspects, and the business model.

For PSPs, acquirers, and banks, the message is pretty clear: even in a public-sector cross-border model, the final mile still belongs to financial institutions and payment providers. The question is not whether intermediaries disappear; it is who sits in the chain, on what terms, and at what fee level.