Fiserv has plans to enable Brazilians to use their Pix national payments system in the U.S. by next year, said an executive for the processing company.

Milwaukee-based Fiserv has already played a role in enabling Brazilians to use Pix in Argentina as of late last year, said Chris Abele, the company’s vice president and general manager of global and emerging payments.

It’s one way in which Fiserv is seeking to create products and services that capitalize on lowering the cost of cross-border payments for merchants and consumers worldwide. As an acquirer for Pix in Brazil, Fiserv is aiding in the enablement of that national payment system’s extension.

“Pix is now an international payment type, meaning it’s a non-card brand that we have enabled in markets like Argentina, and we think there's opportunity for it to be enabled in additional markets in Latin America, and North America,” Abele said in an interview last week. For merchants, “Pix becomes a lower cost of payment, because it doesn't have those same high cost of acceptance fees from Visa and Mastercard.”

For consumers using Pix, they are able to pay with a method they are most comfortable with and there may be lower fees associated with the alternative for them too, he said.

In the three years since the Pix instant payments system was launched by Brazil’s central government, it has become a popular domestic payment choice for consumers and merchants, who benefit from lower costs and speedy transactions. It’s still mainly used just within Brazil.

The U.S. Federal Reserve has also launched a domestic real-time payments system, FedNow, but it hasn’t been widely adopted yet, even in the U.S., because it’s only been in the market since July and U.S. banks are still joining the system.

So, when Brazilians travel around to other countries or make cross-border purchases, they can increasingly use Pix for payments outside Brazil. That has already happened in Argentina, and an extension to North America, including Mexico and Canada, is in the offing.

“It's possible that Brazilians could travel to the U.S. and be able to make payments with Pix later this year, early next year,” Abele said.

Cross-border commerce for merchants, generally, worldwide is a trillion-dollar market, but the high costs of such payments, as much as $100 billion, have burdened merchants with expense and hamstrung consumers with unpredictable foreign exchange costs, Abele said.

Fiserv is also working with some banks that Abele declined to name to create cards that would offer international travelers a fixed, guaranteed exchange rate, he said.

“As consumers travel around the world, they want to use their preferred method of payment,” Abele explained. “So, what we're seeing is that payment methods that may have been traditionally specific to a single country, are starting to go around the world.”

By Lynne Marek on April 4, 2024
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