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Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

(www.economist.com)
666 points jcartw | 2 comments | 08 Apr 25 10:59 UTC | HN request time: 0.407s | source
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afarah1 ◴[08 Apr 25 11:57 UTC] No.43620640[source]▶
WhatsApp is omnipresent for communication in Brazil, and WhatsApp Pay was ready before Pix, but the government blocked the launch to launch Pix first.[1] I rarely see this mentioned.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/brazil-suspends-w...

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ave_b_2011 ◴[08 Apr 25 12:44 UTC] No.43621079[source]▶
This is presented as problematic, but I don’t think it’s a negative thing.

You wouldn’t want a foreign company with billions of dollars in their war chest in charge of your countries payment system.

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1. Mystery-Machine ◴[08 Apr 25 13:01 UTC] No.43621280[source]▶
Isn't that what any other payment system and most of the banks around the world are - a foreign company with billions of dollars in charge of payment system in a country.

VISA, Mastercard, HSBC, UnionPay, ICBC, Santander... Or is this all Brazilian technology?

The difference is that Meta is privacy data hoarder, not that it's a foreign company. And it's not "in charge of countries payment system", because that's pretty-much impossible, but "one of the payment systems in the country".

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2. insane_dreamer ◴[08 Apr 25 15:04 UTC] No.43622619[source]▶
That's why China created UnionPay, so it wouldn't be held hostage to a large foreign corp (Visa, MC) for CC payments.

But most countries didn't have that capability. Kudos to Brazil for putting something together for domestic digital payments so as not to rely on a foreign company.