Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

Pix is super interesting. I have two questions to which Google wasn't able to provide quick answers:

1. Is there an easy way for a US resident to sign up for a Pix-enabled account (e.g. at a Brazilian bank?)

2. Can Pix be used easily for online payments?

If both are true, it seems like it could be used as a drop-in replacement to crypto for small-value transactions which are currently infeasible in the US due to transaction overhead and fees.

1. Yes and No. I assume Wise or another will offer this at some point with better conditions. A vendor called recarga pay offer this already but charges 4% on transactions. 2. yes, and it is used a lot.

My info is several years out of date so take with a grain of salt. Pix is a phenomenal in country payment system. One of a couple of the best next gen payment rails.

But its design is very much hard to work with for international transactions. It has some risk rules and design choices that make this true. I believe this is intentional as Brazil wants to maintain pretty conservative currency controls.

But! Similar things could have been said about pix and online shopping rails. It wasn’t great for that as it wasn’t the primary use case. And that is changing fast so maybe the international use case will improve.

UPI in India for instance does international work well in a similar conservative currency environment.

1. I'm not sure but I'm gonna guess no. Aren't Americans notoriously hard to offer banking services to due to anti-money laundering regulations?

2. Yes, it's quite easy

Wasn't the Fed going to launch their own take on UPI with FedNow?

1. It is possible (Try PicPay), it is not easy, as you need to provide documents that can only be obtained through Brazilian bureaucracy.

America via FATCA requires foreign banks to snitch out all US persons, without any warrant or accusation of crime, to the American IRS, either directly or through exchange agreement for same information through their reporting to the foreign government.

The requirements are fairly simple, but the liability is extreme so that most banks across the world generally are loathe to do this unless you have some kind of resident visa and professional+ income or a large net worth.

If the foreign (Brazilian) bank fails to do so then US cuts off their access to USD.

As a practical matter casual offshore banking for middle class or lower Americans is closed off, the message broadcast loud and clear from the government is they would prefer you to use crypto as a substitute.

On #1, Bank of America operates in Brazil so maybe they offer it.

I remember when I was creating my first bank account, I had to sign under a lot of papers stating that I am not an American citizen and that I'm not lying because of this.

Banco Rendimento, maybe.