Brazil’s Pix Is Drawing Interest in Asia, Latin America and Africa as the USTR Targets It in Trade Findings

Pix, Brazil’s instant payments rail launched in 2020, is being treated very differently depending on where you sit. The U.S. Trade Representative’s office says it distorts competition in payment services; Brazil says it is free and neutral. For PSPs, the useful bit is simple: Pix is no longer just a domestic scheme — it is becoming a reference point for fast-payment integration and cross-border transfer use cases.

1. The U.S. Trade Representative’s final report on its trade investigation cited Pix as one of the Brazilian policies affecting U.S. commerce and recommended a 25% tariff on Brazilian exports to the U.S., with exceptions. The Trump administration’s line is that Brazilian policy favors Pix over American companies in electronic payments, and that the Central Bank’s dual role as both regulator and operator creates a “conflict of interest.”
2. Brazil, for its part, presents Pix as free and neutral. The scheme has also become a political and commercial export: the Colombian real-time payments system Bre-B was built on the Pix model and has been in full operation since October 2025.
3. Interest is not hypothetical. Over the past year, representatives of Brazil’s Central Bank logged interactions with more than 15 delegations about the instant payments system created in 2020. The list includes South Africa, Panama, Morocco, Nigeria, Namibia, Paraguay, Thailand, Ghana, Aruba, Moldova, the United Arab Emirates, the Philippines, Japan, Bahrain, Trinidad and Tobago and Burkina Faso, with additional interest cited from Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and China.
4. Not every country wants to copy Pix outright. The source says there is also demand for integrating fast-payment systems to make international transfers easier, which is the part PSPs should watch: the market conversation is moving from “let’s build our own Pix” to “how do we connect fast-payment rails across borders without turning settlement into a mess.”

For high-risk payment providers, the signal is less about Brazil specifically and more about how domestic instant-payment schemes are becoming strategic infrastructure. Once a rail gets political attention from the U.S., gets copied in Colombia, and gets meetings from 15+ foreign delegations, it stops being a local implementation detail and starts looking like a corridor that banks, PSPs and acquirers will be asked to connect to.