Brazil Champions Pix in Face of US Probe

The Brazilian government launched a social media campaign defending the country’s instant payment system, Pix, after the U.S. government said it is investigating the system as one of several alleged unfair trading practices.

The slogan of the campaign is “PIXéNosso, My Friend” (“Pix is Ours, My Friend”), the Financial Times (FT) reported Monday (July 21).

Casa Civil, the official profile of the Civil House of the Presidency of the Republic, included that slogan in a Wednesday (July 16) post on X.

Together with an image of the slogan, the post said, according to a translation by the social media platform, “PIX is from Brazil and for Brazilians! It seems our PIX is causing quite a stir of jealousy out there, huh? There’s even a letter complaining about the existence of our Secure, Confidential, and Fee-free system.”

The social media campaign was launched after the U.S. said Tuesday (July 15) that it had began an investigation into what it said were Brazil’s “unfair trade practices” and that one part of that probe would look into whether the country discriminated against U.S. companies in favor of Pix, according to the FT report.

The report said that Mastercard’s Brazil division President Marcelo Tangioni said in 2022 that Pix should be made independent of Brazil’s central bank, adding that the bank “cannot compete and regulate at the same time,” and that Meta’s WhatsApp said in 2020 that it believed the central bank blocked the company’s digital payments system in Brazil for a time because the system could compete with Pix.

When the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) announced its investigation of Brazil’s practices, it did not mention Pix by name but said it would include “digital trade and electronic payment services.”

“Brazil may undermine the competitiveness of U.S. companies engaged in these sectors, for example, by retaliating against them for failing to censor political speech or restricting their ability to provide services in the country,” the USTR said in a Tuesday press release.

The PYMNTS Intelligence and Galileo Financial Technologies collaboration “Digital Developments: Charting Digital Payment Growth in Latin America” found that Pix has become one of Brazil’s most preferred payment methods.

The number of transactions per month processed by Pix at the end of 2024 surpassed the combined total of debit and credit card transactions by 80%, according to the report.