When Brazil launched Pix in November 2020, its proposition was relatively easy to understand: money could move between accounts within seconds, at any time of day and on any day of the week.
Less than six years later, Pix has moved far beyond the experimental stage. Brazil’s central bank now reports more than 170 million individual users, while more than seven billion Pix transactions were completed in May 2026 alone. (bcb.gov.br)
Yet the most interesting part of the Pix story may no longer be its growth.
The Pix Management Report 2023-2025, released by Banco Central do Brasil on August 10, 2026, offers a clearer view of what the infrastructure could become next.
The roadmap covers possible connections with credit markets, B2B receivables, fraud prevention, payment intermediaries and foreign instant payment systems. These initiatives are at different stages of development and should not all be understood as services already available today. (bcb.gov.br)
The broader direction, however, is becoming clear:
payment is increasingly becoming the starting point for other financial services.
From payment product to digital public infrastructure
Brazil’s central bank explicitly describes Pix as a Digital Public Infrastructure designed to evolve alongside technological change and the needs of individuals, businesses, financial institutions and government entities.
Its longer-term vision increasingly brings together instant settlement, Open Finance, financial data and potentially tokenised assets. (bcb.gov.br)
That distinction matters.
A payment instrument primarily answers one question: how can value move from one party to another?
Economic infrastructure can support much more.
It can help identify the actors behind a transaction, link a payment to an invoice or receivable, automate financial processes, generate risk information and potentially support access to financing.
Several items in the new Pix roadmap point precisely in that direction.
Future Pix flows could become collateral
One of the most significant initiatives described by the central bank is the use of future Pix flows as collateral for credit operations.
The concept is to allow information and future payment flows generated inside the Pix ecosystem to support the financing of economic activity. The central bank expects that such a mechanism could improve the quality of collateral and potentially reduce borrowing costs, particularly for companies that receive a significant share of their revenues through Pix. (bcb.gov.br)
Consider a small merchant receiving hundreds of Pix payments every week.
Each individual transaction simply represents a payment. But taken together over time, those payments can reveal something more: the continuity of the business, the regularity of its cash inflows and their evolution.
That information could give a lender greater visibility into the company's ability to generate future cash flows.
In that scenario, the payment is no longer only the settlement of a previous sale. The expected stream of future payments can also become part of the financing of future activity.
The report does not yet provide all the operational, legal and prudential details that would govern such a mechanism. Transaction history alone would certainly not be enough to determine creditworthiness.
But the strategic direction is significant.
A payment infrastructure operating at sufficient scale can begin to produce information that is useful well beyond payment processing itself.
A major opportunity for SMEs and a new source of risk
This approach could be particularly relevant for smaller businesses.
One of the traditional obstacles to SME finance is information asymmetry. A business may have real sales and regular customers while lacking traditional collateral or extensive financial statements.
Structured digital payment flows could reduce part of that information gap.
There is, however, another side to the equation.
If transaction data increasingly influence credit decisions, businesses generating extensive digital histories may become easier to finance than firms whose activities remain largely cash-based or otherwise less visible.
A tool intended to broaden access to credit could therefore create a new divide between businesses that are digitally visible and those that are not.
The key question is not merely whether payment data can improve risk assessment.
It is also who should be allowed to use those data, under which conditions, with what safeguards and with what mechanisms for businesses to challenge inaccurate conclusions.
Connecting payments to B2B receivables
Pix is also being considered as part of Brazil's electronic trade receivables infrastructure.
The central bank describes work involving duplicatas escriturais, electronically registered commercial receivables. Pix QR codes could be used to settle those instruments, bringing instant liquidity, real-time reconciliation and improved traceability into the process.
The report highlights that this would mark the first direct link within Pix between the payment instrument and a financial asset. (bcb.gov.br)
That represents another important shift.
A basic instant payment system knows that money moved.
A more deeply integrated financial infrastructure can also know which commercial obligation the payment is settling, who ultimately owns the receivable and how that receivable may have been transferred.
For businesses, such integration could significantly improve treasury operations and reconciliation.
Knowing who ultimately receives the money
The growing use of payment intermediaries creates another challenge.
Marketplaces and other intermediaries may receive funds into their own accounts on behalf of final beneficiaries. When the ultimate recipient is not properly visible, it can weaken fraud-recovery mechanisms and create operational, credit and integrity risks.
Banco Central do Brasil is therefore considering regulatory and operational improvements aimed at increasing transparency across these payment chains, making final beneficiaries more visible and strengthening the traceability of funds. (bcb.gov.br)
This is more important than it may initially appear.
As a payment infrastructure becomes more important to the economy, it can no longer be concerned only with whether money travelled from account A to account B.
It increasingly needs to understand who is acting for whom and where the funds are ultimately supposed to go.
Fraud intelligence could become shared infrastructure
Another particularly ambitious initiative is a centralised Pix fraud-probability indicator.
The central bank is exploring the use of its information on Pix transactions and confirmed fraud markers to calculate, in real time, the probability that a transaction may be fraudulent.
The proposed indicator would use a machine-learning model and could eventually be made available to participating institutions as an additional input for their own fraud-prevention systems. The final decision to approve or reject the payment would remain with each institution. (bcb.gov.br)
An important caveat should not be overlooked.
The central bank explicitly states that developing the indicator does not necessarily mean it will eventually be shared with participants. Deployment will depend both on confidence in the model and on a legal assessment of whether such information can be distributed. (bcb.gov.br)
A centralised signal could provide institutions with a view that none of them could obtain individually.
But that also raises significant governance issues: false positives, model bias, cybersecurity, systemic dependence on a common signal and the ability of customers to challenge incorrect assessments.
As payment infrastructures generate more information, data governance itself becomes part of payment infrastructure design.
The next frontier may be cross-border
Pix may ultimately extend beyond Brazil as well.
Banco Central do Brasil says it is assessing ways to connect Pix with instant payment systems in other jurisdictions, including both bilateral connections and multilateral hubs.
Such arrangements could allow international transfers and purchases to settle into local currency within seconds, potentially reducing costs and improving speed, accessibility and transparency. (bcb.gov.br)
Brazil is not alone in exploring this question.
On August 11, 2026, Reserve Bank of India Governor Sanjay Malhotra confirmed that BRICS countries were discussing possible links between their fast payment systems and their central bank digital currencies.
He also made clear that these discussions remain preliminary and that no implementation decision has been taken. (reuters.com)
The broader issue is increasingly relevant.
Once domestic instant-payment systems become successful, the next question is how they can interact internationally without recreating all the delays, costs and opacity that instant payments removed from domestic transactions.
A useful question for PI-SPI and the WAEMU
This discussion is especially relevant to West Africa following the launch of the BCEAO's PI-SPI regional instant-payment infrastructure on September 30, 2025.
PI-SPI enables instant and interoperable payments across banks, electronic-money issuers, microfinance institutions and payment institutions in the eight WAEMU countries. BCEAO has also identified improved corporate treasury management and greater automation of payment flows among the platform's expected benefits. (bceao.int)
The two systems are clearly at very different stages.
Pix has operated since 2020 and already enjoys massive adoption. PI-SPI is still scaling: as of June 24, 2026, BCEAO reported 80 connected participants, while another 74 institutions were still undergoing integration and live-testing processes. (bceao.int)
Copying Brazil's roadmap immediately would therefore make little sense.
But Brazil raises a question that is worth considering early.
Should an instant-payment platform be designed only to move money faster?
Or should its governance and technical foundations also preserve the possibility of eventually supporting broader services around invoicing, receivables, treasury management, credit and fraud prevention?
Those services would not necessarily need to be provided by the central bank itself.
A public infrastructure can provide standards, interoperability and common rules while allowing banks, fintechs and other providers to compete in the services built on top of it.
That may ultimately be one of Pix's most important lessons.
The real potential may begin after the payment
For years, the quality of a payment system could largely be assessed through a small number of indicators: speed, availability, security and cost.
Those fundamentals remain essential.
But something changes once millions of people and businesses use the same infrastructure every day.
Payments create flows.
Flows generate data.
Data provide information about economic activity.
And that information can support new services.
Credit, invoicing, reconciliation, fraud prevention and cross-border payments are gradually becoming connected to the same underlying infrastructure in Brazil.
The question may therefore no longer be only:
How do we build better payment systems?
It may increasingly become:
What can we build when payment itself becomes infrastructure?
