> serious flaws that need addressing

I'm not familiar with Pix but from what I've read, it's similar to India's UPI. There only two real problems with UPI:

1. Card networks have standard dispute resolution process which often involves a temporary credit while the investigation is ongoing. Disputing UPI transactions on the other hand is painful.

2. Banks don't make any money on UPI transactions. And with UPI credit transactions, they are basically giving people interest free loans. And considering there are no transaction fees, this is open for abuse.

What kind of abuse?

Alice registers as a merchant and has her friend Bob pay her a large amount of money using a UPI enabled credit card. Neither Alice nor Bob paid any transaction charges. Alice sticks the money in a high interest bank account and returns the money to Bob after 30 days along with half of the interest she earned. Bob pays off his credit card bill before the due date and therefore isn't charged any interest. Alice and Bob have made money out of thin air.

To register as a merchant, a reasonably large (i think) turnover is needed, in a sustained manner ( iirc a few months).

The UPI over credit card is primarily there for peer-peee merchant transactions...

> To register as a merchant, a reasonably large (i think) turnover is needed, in a sustained manner ( iirc a few months).

Nope. Signing up as a merchant is simply the matter of downloading the business version of GPay or Paytm and submitting minimal KYC documents.

> peer-peee merchant

Did not understand this part.

Sorry, was on mobile typing that, and turns out I was wrong. The UPI over credit card is only for Peer to Merchant transactions. To be a merchant (As against a peer merchant), you must have a month over month inflow of atleast 50,000 INR, for 3 months after being onboarded as a peer-merchant. [1]

I think you were talking about registering as a peer-merchant, not a "proper" merchant! MDR etc cannot be charged on peer-merchants[1], and are essentially peers, but with restricted purpose codes that they can accept money for.

[1] https://www.npci.org.in/PDF/npci/upi/circular/2019/Circular%...

The circular is out of date. Having helped people register for for GPay and Paytm business accounts, I know for a fact that this is no longer true.

I don't think that kind of fraud would work in the Pix system. Pix transactions are debit, so Bob is out of the money immediately.

Of course, it is possible there might be some bank offering a pix-enabled credit card, but I don't see how they'd have any incentive, precisely because people could start doing that.

This is actually already quite common in developed countries in reasonable parts of the world. Many countries in Europe, Asia for example have something native. The US has even tried a few times, but seems forever behind the times. Even 3DS is practically a joke in the US.

If you're in America then the latest entry is FedNow.

See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_payment

Things like 3DS benefit issuers and merchants due to lower fraud rates, but take more time, are higher friction and likely lead to fewer payments in total. If something like that doesn't exist or is watered down in the US it's likely because the issuers in the US decided that it wasn't worth the experiential or monetary cost. Or that they have other ways of identifying and dealing with fraudulent transactions, like ML models on the backend.

It's almost certainly a bean counter making that decision - and it's theirs to make - not due to some kind of technical inability to make 3DS work. The US is a low fraud rate market that values faster/easier transactions at point of sale over lower absolute fraud, almost certainly because it maximizes total profit.

Generally, a no-fraud environment isn't optimal.

Yes. India has UPI since 2016 I think.

> then why don't we all start Pix in our countries?

Good question. Maybe some inter-bank tech is already in place in some countries that make it easier/harder.

I've been repeatedly told the Banking system in Brazil is top notch and an early adopter of many innovations. (I have also been told that this is because banking fraud and security are entangled in a very fast-paced arms race)

Maybe its just matter of time. There was a (top) post in HN about how the Fed was starting something that I _think_ is Pix in the US.

It's an incentives problem, not a technology problem. In the United States, interchange is one of the main sources of revenue both for card issuers (both debit and credit). Even though card network rails have their flaws (e.g. fraud, settlement speed, cost), it's unlikely that major banks will adopt another system unless it's as lucrative, or until there's regulatory action that forces them to do so.

Australia has Osko, an instant payment system. It's handy, but not as broad as Pix, e.g. Osko is mostly limited to transfers between bank accounts, whereas Pix is widely accepted by merchants, both on-line and brick and mortar.

Osko is built on top of Australia's "New Payment Platform" (NPP). As I understand it, NPP is basically a fast peer-to-peer transaction layer. Based on comments above, it's similar to Pix in that it's implemented by the Reserve Bank and it can use different account IDs (called PayIDs) such as email address or phone number.

PayIDs weren't available to businesses when last I looked, for whatever reason, but I think the Eftpos network also uses the NPP. So you can certainly use this network to make payments to business, but you need an EFTPOS card, and most of the banks issue Visa or Mastercard network cards instead.

Sweden has Swish which was created by the banks and is extremely popular

Japan has PayPay which is a privately operated system

PayPay is one of many competing services. From August they're going to stop letting you use other credit cards with PayPay; I suspect (and frankly hope) that will hurt their adoption a lot.

There are others but I've never seen anyone actually use them. Maybe LINE Pay, and people spending d-points.

And while personally I'm going to be affected by their change in credit card rules, everyone I know uses it with cash to get in on their gatcha mechanics. Everyone is surprised when my payment doesn't have the "roll" to see if you won anything.

I've used Line Pay and AU Pay (indeed if we're talking about person-to-person money transfer I've seen more of that with Line than anything else, although of course it's the same company), and I think I've seen the Aeon one get used too. If you include the various tap-to-pay systems then there's a whole lot more.

France has Paylib which was created by the banks and is used by nobody because it’s an incredible PITA to use.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36012262 (subthread with a list of some of the instant payment systems globally)

UPI[1] exists in India. FedNow[2] recently went live in the United States.

As for why it doesn't exist in every country: it takes a bit of technical work to get the system working and governments move slowly, for better or for worse.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow

One of the reasons Pix took off as hard as it did is because the incumbent instant payment system (TED) only worked during business hours. It basically got digg'd once a 24/7 free service came around to replace it.

No fees and an extremely simple UX are the other reasons it got there this fast. Plus the fact that it's operated by the central bank (trust!).

> Plus the fact that it's operated by the central bank (trust!).

I'm far from an expert or even knowledgeable about finance related matters, but isn't one of the things HN (in general) fearful of with respect to CBDC's the centralization aspect with the government. How is this any different, if any?

HN is not the real world and a lot of their fears is unjustified or overblown

The entire world of commerce is trustful, pretending otherwise is silly. FedNow just replaces the extant ACH network, and I assume Pix does something similar. This isn't a CBDC, just infrastructure for moving money between institutions - and even within CBDCs there are privacy-preserving ways of implementing it. Reality is far more banal than some of the more extreme perspectives here.

It is not true that TED got replaced or killed. In fact, it is still the leading transfer method considering the transaction volume, and by a good amount. Pix leads considering the sheer quantity of transactions. According to Central Bank data[0], in the last quarter, 2.09 trillion USD was settled via TED vs 720 billion USD via Pix.

Pix is great as a payment method for the average person, you use it to split a check and pay for your Uber, but big money still flows mostly via TED and other means.

[0] https://www.bcb.gov.br/estatisticas/spbadendos

From what I understand from the article it sounds like Vipps in Norway.

Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia have similar systems. All instant and free. Malaysia system actually works in Thailand and Singapore and has super competitive exchange rates.

> Are there similar payment systems out there similar to this?

FedNow just launched. Interac has something similar (but not identical) in Canada. Faster Payments in the UK. SEPA payments in the EU. NPP in Australia. UPI in India. Much of the world has had a comparable solution to some extent for a while now. Most of this materialized over the last 10 to 15-ish years.

Really the US was the main laggard and that's over now.

In Russia we have SBP (system of fast transfers in Russian). It allows to quickly send money by using a telephone number or QR code. It was quite popular for the last 4 years thanks to absence of additional taxes and commissions on small to medium transactions, but since 2022, when Visa and Mastercard left, it became order of magnitude more popular. Almost every shop, small and big, uses it now, although we also have an alternative card system MIR.

> why don't we all start Pix in our countries?

Regulatory capture?

Brazilian Central Bank will be giving the system to other countries that might be interested IIRC.

The reason a lot of countries don't do this is likely private merchant or banks lobby.