Pix

Overview

Pix is the Brazilian Central Bank's instant payment system, launched on 16 November 2020 ^{1, 2}. Funds settle 24/7/365 in under ten seconds, free for individuals and at ~0.33 % for merchants ¹. As of late 2025 it had 178 million users — about 91 % of Brazilian adults ^{1, 3}. The payload that travels in a Pix QR code is the BR Code, an EMVCo Merchant-Presented Mode (MPM) profile published by the BCB ^{4, 5}. At the 5-year mark (Nov 2025) Pix approached ~7.9 billion transactions per month (first single month past 7 B in December 2025), with cumulative ~196 billion transactions since launch and an annual run-rate near USD 6.7 trillion — more than combined Brazilian credit + debit card volume ^{6, 7}. Pix P2B (merchant) volume surpassed Pix P2P for the first time in September 2025 (44 % P2B vs 43 % P2P), marking the rail's transition from consumer-to-consumer convenience layer to dominant retail-payment rail ⁷.

History

The Banco Central do Brasil (BCB) created an internal working group called Pagamentos Instantâneos in May 2018, during Michel Temer's administration, to design what would become Pix ¹. The system was publicly announced in February 2019 ^{1, 2} and was launched on a restricted-trial basis on 3 November 2020 for 1–5 % of bank customers, then opened to the general public on 16 November 2020 ¹. The project was carried forward by then-BCB president Roberto Campos Neto under the Bolsonaro administration ¹.

The Central Bank's stated objectives were: reduce reliance on cash, increase financial inclusion, spur competition in a concentrated banking sector dominated by five large banks, and modernise the national payment system ^{2, 8}. Adoption outpaced every forecast — Pix reached 150 million users (≈ 70 % of the adult population) within four years ⁷ and ~178 million users by mid-2025 ¹.

Recent additions to the system:

November 2022: Pix Saque + Pix Troco (cash withdrawal at merchants) ².
June 2025: launch of Pix Automático — recurring authorised payments for subscriptions, utilities, school fees and rent. Targets the ~60 % of Brazilians without a credit card ^{9, 10}.
2025 (rolling out): Pix Internacional — partnerships to enable cross-border Pix payments to Argentina, Uruguay, and the United States ¹⁰.

Technical specification

The Pix QR code is called BR Code. It is a Brazilian profile of the EMVCo Consumer-Presented / Merchant-Presented QR Code Specification ^{4, 5} — the same EMVCo framework that underpins SGQR (Singapore), DuitNow (Malaysia), and other national QR-payment standards.

Property	Value
Payload format	EMVCo TLV (Tag-Length-Value) text string
Integrity check	CRC-16/CCITT-FALSE appended as field `63` ⁴
Identifying GUI	`br.gov.bcb.pix` (inside the merchant-account-information template at tag `26`) ⁴
Underlying symbology	QR Code (ISO/IEC 18004)
Currency code	986 (BRL — Brazilian Real) ⁴
Country code	BR ⁴

Two QR code variants ^{4, 11}:

Static BR Code — encodes the recipient's Pix key (and optionally a fixed amount). Reusable. Suited to a printed sticker at a market stall or a tip jar.
Dynamic BR Code — encodes a URL that resolves (via JWT) to a per-transaction payload containing the amount, due date, identification (txid), and optional fines / discounts / expiry. Suited to invoices and e-commerce.

Pix Keys (account identifiers) ¹:

CPF — individual tax ID
CNPJ — business tax ID
Email address
Mobile phone number (with country code)
EVP — random UUID, for users who want a key that isn't personally identifying

Transaction types supported ¹:

P2P (person-to-person)
P2B (person-to-business)
B2B (business-to-business)
P2G (person-to-government)
B2G (business-to-government)

Use cases

Pix is a national payment rail, so the use cases are broad and the numbers are large:

Person-to-person transfers — instant, free, replacing cash and bank transfers for everyday splitting of bills, paying friends ¹.
Retail point of sale — static QR stickers at small merchants (food trucks, market stalls); dynamic QR at modern POS terminals. P2B volume grew 94 % YoY in 2024 — the fastest-growing Pix use case ⁷.
E-commerce checkout — dynamic BR Code generated server-side per cart; customer scans with their banking app. Pix has overtaken cards as the dominant online-checkout method for many Brazilian merchants ⁷.
Business-to-business settlement — December 2024 B2B Pix volume exceeded R$1 trillion (~USD 200 billion), 56 % YoY growth ⁷.
Government tax and benefit payments — P2G and B2G ¹.
Recurring billing — Pix Automático (since June 2025) for subscriptions, rent, utilities — explicitly designed to extend recurring-payment access to the ~60 % of Brazilians without a credit card ^{9, 10}.
Cash withdrawal — Pix Saque / Pix Troco lets a customer withdraw cash from a participating merchant during a payment ².

Implementations

The Pix BR Code is text-based and the underlying QR Code symbology is supported by every QR library, so most "Pix libraries" focus on building / validating the EMVCo TLV payload rather than the QR rendering.

Encoders / decoders:

TypeScript / JavaScript — thalesog/pix-utils — 92★, active 2025. Parses BR Code strings back to structured payment data, generates static + dynamic codes, exports Base64 PNG ¹².
Python — cleitonleonel/pypix — 58★, 2021. Generates static + dynamic BR Code QR codes with visual customisation ¹³.
JavaScript — hiagodotme/gpix, gjmolter/pix-charge, gab618/pix-js, ogilvieira/pixbrasil — smaller libraries focused on minimal BR-Code generation ¹⁴.

Official reference: the BCB publishes its API and message schemas on GitHub at bacen/pix-api — this is the canonical source for participants integrating with the Pix instant-payment network (not just the QR code) ¹⁵.

Comparison

vs. UPI QR (India's Unified Payments Interface) — Both are central-bank-driven national instant payment rails launched in the same era; both have crossed 100B+ annual transactions. UPI uses a upi://pay?pa=...&am=... URL inside the QR rather than EMVCo TLV; Pix uses the international EMVCo MPM format. UPI is multi-bank-app from day one (any UPI app can pay any UPI handle); Pix similarly works across all banks via Pix keys but with a different naming convention (Pix key vs UPI VPA). Pix charges merchants ~0.33 %; UPI is free for all parties ^{1, 7}.

vs. EPC QR / Stuzza (European EPC QR / Girocode) — Both are bank-issued QR payment standards. EPC QR carries a SEPA Credit Transfer initiation; Pix carries an instant-payment initiation against the Pix network. EPC QR is text-line based (BCD format with newline-separated fields); BR Code is EMVCo TLV. Pix has dynamic QR codes with per-transaction amount and metadata; EPC QR is essentially always static ⁵.

The BR Code's choice of EMVCo TLV (instead of a custom BCB-only format) is what makes Pix consumable by international wallets like Revolut and Wise — both implement EMVCo TLV parsing already for other markets [hub3-ref].

Fun facts

In Q4 2024, Pix transaction volume was 80 % higher than the combined total of Brazilian credit and debit card transactions ⁷. In other words, a five-year-old free payment network surpassed the entire incumbent card-payment infrastructure within five years of launch.

Pix's growth trajectory is the steepest of any national real-time payment system on record — comparable launches (UPI in India, FedNow in the US, FPS in the UK) all took at least a decade to reach a fraction of Pix's per-capita transaction volume ^{3, 16}. The BCB attributes the speed of adoption to three deliberate design choices: free for individuals, mandatory participation for banks with >500k customers, and a single national addressing system (Pix keys) that doesn't require knowing the recipient's bank or account number ^{1, 8}.

Status

Active and rapidly expanding. Pix processed 63.4 billion transactions worth ~USD 4.6 trillion in 2024, a 53 % YoY increase in both volume and value ⁷. EBANX projects ~8 billion monthly transactions by end of 2025, with total annual volume of USD 6.7 trillion (a further 34 % YoY) ¹⁶. Recent feature additions (Pix Automático June 2025, ongoing Pix Internacional rollout) signal continued investment by the BCB rather than maintenance mode.

No successor or deprecation planned. International influence: the BCB is actively in talks with foreign central banks about Pix as a reference implementation for new instant-payment systems ³.

Sources

Deployments

Found in the following country reports (grep across reports/countries/):