Most of Pix’s lead over the UK’s Faster Payments comes from how Brazil designed it. Pix has a name people use at the till, and the biggest Brazilian banks were required to offer it from the first day. On top of that, the Central Bank of Brazil has shipped new features almost every year since 2020.
Britain got there first. Faster Payments went live in 2008, when most countries still took up to three days to clear a bank transfer, and Pix only arrived in November 2020. Last year, Faster Payments handled around 5.5 billion payments, a record for the system, and December was the first month to pass half a billion. Pix handled 79.8 billion over the same period. Adjusted for population, Brazilians made roughly four to five times as many instant payments as people in the UK.
LaFinteca’s business in Brazil runs on Pix, and I spend a lot of time in Europe, so this comparison comes up for me more than for most. Five decisions explain most of the gap.
Why do Brazilians say “Pix” when Britons say “bank transfer”?
In São Paulo, people pay for a taxi or a market stall “by Pix”. Someone in Manchester would say they sent a bank transfer, or name their banking app, and very few people there have heard of Faster Payments even though it moves their money.
Pix launched with its own name, logo and standard QR code. It also came with an address system called chave, which lets you pay someone using their phone number or email instead of their account details. A shared name gives buyer and seller the same expectation, so adoption stopped depending on how well each bank had designed its app.
Why did Pix reach everyone so quickly?
The Central Bank of Brazil required every institution with more than 500,000 active accounts to offer Pix from launch. A customer of a small digital wallet could pay someone at one of the country’s largest banks instantly in the very first week.
Faster Payments grew through voluntary adoption, and it grew well. For years, though, what you could do with it depended on which bank you used, and that kind of patchy experience slows habits down.
How did Pix become a checkout method?
Individuals pay nothing to use Pix, and merchants pay a fraction of what cards cost them. The shop use case was there from the beginning too, with a standard QR code that a supermarket can show on a screen and a street vendor can print on a piece of card.
In September 2025, person-to-business Pix payments passed person-to-person for the first time, less than five years after launch. In the UK, paying a shop straight from your bank account is only now arriving through Open Banking, and it still works differently from one provider to the next.
How often does Brazil’s central bank update Pix?
Pix launched with a public roadmap, and the central bank has mostly kept to it. Pix Automático arrived in June 2025 and brought recurring payments to Pix, so subscriptions and utility bills can now be paid straight from a bank account. In February 2026 a stronger version of the fraud return mechanism became mandatory, with tracing that follows the money from one account to the next. New security requirements for participating institutions came in March.
Faster Payments is mature and very reliable, and the UK is currently reworking how payments are governed under its National Payments Vision. Brazil’s experience points toward publishing a roadmap for Faster Payments and releasing often, so banks and merchants can see what’s coming and build for it.
How much of Pix’s success comes from Brazil’s starting point?
A fair amount, and any honest comparison has to say so. When Pix launched, Brazil had tens of millions of adults without a bank account, and Pix gave many of them a reason to open one. Around 80% of Brazilians use it today.
The UK had far fewer unbanked adults, and cards already worked well, so people had less reason to switch to a new way to pay. Even so, any country that wanted to could copy each of the decisions above.
What could the UK borrow from Pix?
For me, the biggest one is a single consumer name for paying from your bank account, with the same checkout whichever bank you use. A standard QR code and a phone-number address layer would make that much easier, so that paying a local café feels as simple as paying back a friend.
I’d also like to see a public product roadmap for Faster Payments, with recurring payments and fraud recovery planned in from the start. The UK already has capable regulators and a system that settles in seconds, so most of the remaining work sits on the side customers actually see, at the till and inside their banking app.
Dmytro Rukin is CEO at LaFinteca, a payment infrastructure company operating across Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Colombia) and Europe. He writes about payments, instant payment systems like Pix and market entry.
