Brazil wants to expand Pix to Latin America, says BC president

Expanding Pix to Latin America is the Central Bank’s priority in the internationalization of Brazil’s instant payments system, said Roberto Campos Neto, president of the monetary authority, this Friday (30).

According to the BC chief, Colombia, Uruguay and Peru showed interest in developing a tool along the same lines as Pix, with a low cost – R$ 5 million was invested in the project – and a “time to market” (time to market ) in line with the Brazilian experience.

“This week we had a meeting with presidents of the central banks of Colombia [Leonardo Villar]from Uruguay [Diego Labat] and from Peru [Julio Velarde Flores]. They said: ‘We want to make a Pix'”, said Campos Neto, at an event organized by the startup DrumWave, in São Paulo.

“So we opened a session in November, with six days, in which we will show everything we did on Pix to anyone who wants to. Our priority now is Latin America, but it has a chance to expand a lot”, he added.

In August, Campos Neto said that he had been talking a lot with Colombia’s central banker on the subject. At the time, he said that Canada is also interested in the Pix because it is “very cheap”.

The president also said that Pix “is just beginning” and that “there’s a lot ahead.”

Criticism of the electoral use of Pix

A day earlier, in a press conference on the quarterly inflation report, Campos Neto countered the political use of Pix by President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) in his reelection campaign, saying that the instant payments system is an achievement of BC officials, who worked “day and night” during the pandemic to launch the tool in November 2020.

“Pix is ​​an achievement of the Central Bank, of Central Bank employees,” he said. “Pix will continue to exist even when I am no longer here, Pix was not my project.”

As for the development of the digital real, Campos Neto said this Friday that the BC intends to expand efforts in the creation of the Brazilian CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency).

“We have the theme of the proof of concept that we are developing. There should be a CBDC pilot ready next year, hopefully at the beginning of the second semester [de 2023]”, said.

Due to the strike by BC servers, the execution of the projects selected for the Lift Challenge innovation lab on digital real was delayed in the schedule. The work, which was supposed to take place between March and July, began only in September and will now run until January of the next year.

“This is the project that I pay the most attention today, the project that we need to accelerate more, we have weekly meetings. We are even making an internal movement in the BC to support this project more”, he added.

Campos Neto also spoke about the regulation of cryptocurrencies at the event in São Paulo. “The BC has never been working so closely with the CVM (Comissão de Valores Imobiliários) as it is at the moment. We think we don’t have much time to waste on this topic of cryptoassets,” he said.

The PL (the bill) that imposes rules on the crypto-assets market was symbolically approved in April in the Senate and is awaiting analysis in the Chamber of Deputies, before going to President Bolsonaro’s sanction.

“The project had no segregation of accounts, we thought we needed to include it, it is a somewhat complex period now to make many changes in projects because we are very close to the elections, but we will come back to that”, he said.

The BC president said in previous events that the bill represents a first step in the regulation of the market and there is an understanding that the issue of asset segregation returns to the text in progress. For Campos Neto, parliamentarians are open to dialogue.

The proposal has been called by some parliamentarians as a “regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies”, for establishing guidelines for financial operations carried out with crypto-assets in the national territory.