I've worked with banking tech for almost 20 years in Brazil. The Pix system is great, but before that we already had TED which was slower but very reliable (the main downside is that it that it closes outside commercial hours for post processing). There are a lot of a lot of other things like Boleto (which are use for billing) and more recently the "Open Finance" system which allows different institutions to share customer data and even perform operations using connect accounts. It allows a customer to, for instance, check all of their balance in a single place. It allow institutions to learn more about you which can facilitate credit.
The reason? Why is a third world, poor country like Brazil so advanced on finance? While there's no single reason myself and most of the execs I've worked with tend to believe in two:
- Fraud, which is rampant in Brazil, incentivizes banks to invest a lot into modernizing their systems
- Complex financial rules, imposed by our government, required a lot of investment in systems as well
These all come from the 80s, so by now we have modern, fully digital systems in all our financial institutions, so things like pix and open finance can be easily implemented.
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