Pix changed payments in Brazil. Now the financial system is being built on top of it

Pix is no longer just a substitute for TED transfers and boletos. In 2025, it accounted for 30.1 billion transactions, up 20% from the previous year, according to Febraban, and it has become core infrastructure for Brazil’s financial system. For high-risk merchants and PSPs, the useful part is simple: when one rail becomes the default rail, everything else has to adapt around it.

1. Leonardo Baptista, who heads Pay4Fun, says Pix has moved from being a payment option to a central part of how Brazilians handle money. Launched in November 2020, it now sits at the center of daily financial activity rather than at the edge of it.
2. The next phase, in his view, is not about replacing Pix but about building on it. He points to a broader shift over the next five years involving instant payments, data sharing, artificial intelligence, digital assets, and new forms of credit. The result, he says, will be money moving faster, more integrated, and in many cases becoming invisible to the consumer.
3. For the legal betting market, Baptista says Pix already dominates: “All transactions in the legal bets market are based on it.” That makes Pix not just a consumer payment method, but a settlement layer that now shapes an entire vertical.
4. The Banco Central agenda, as he describes it, includes Pix por aproximação, Pix Parcelado, Pix em garantia, and improvements to the Mecanismo Especial de Devolução, or MED 2.0. He also says Pix Automático should expand recurring payments such as monthly fees, subscriptions, insurance, utility bills, and business billing.
5. His point on risk is the one PSPs will care about most: faster payments need to be identifiable, auditable, and protected by effective fraud controls. In other words, speed is not the problem; unmanaged speed is.

He also draws a line between Pix and cards rather than treating them as a zero-sum fight. Pix should keep expanding in cash payments, transfers, recurring charges, and low-cost operations, while cards remain relevant for installment credit, loyalty programs, and other use cases that still sit naturally on card rails.