In late August, Roberto Campos Neto, the head of Brazil’s central bank, is reported to have said about Pix, the bank’s two-year-old real-time-payments (RTP) system, that it “eliminates the need to have a credit card. I think that credit cards will cease to exist at some point soon.” Wow! Sounds amazing. A new system that does everything a credit card can do, but better.
As the old saying goes, however, something that sounds too good to be true probably isn’t. While Pix has some advantages, it also has many disadvantages. In particular, it lacks many of the features currently offered by credit cards, such as liability caps, fraud prevention, and—perhaps crucially—access to credit. So, it seems unlikely to replace credit cards any time soon.
Pix and the Unbanked
When Brazil’s central bank launched Pix in November 2020, evangelists at the bank hoped it would offer a low-cost alternative to existing payments and would entice some of the country’s tens of millions of unbanked and underbanked adults into the banking system. While Pix has, indeed, attracted many users, it has done little, if anything, to solve the problem of the unbanked.
Proponents of Pix asserted that the RTP system would dramatically reduce the number of unbanked individuals in Brazil. While it is true that many Brazilians who were previously unbanked do now have Pix accounts, it would be incorrect to conclude that Pix was the reason they ceased to be unbanked.
A study by Americas Market Intelligence (commissioned by Mastercard) found that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, “Brazil reduced its unbanked population by an astounding 73%.” But the study was based on research conducted between June and August 2020 and was published in October 2020, the month before Pix launched. It described the implementation of state and federal programs launched in Brazil in response to the pandemic:
- The “Coronavoucher” program distributed emergency funds to low-income informal workers exclusively via state-owned bank Caixa Econômica Federal (CEF). Applications for funds could only be made via CEF’s Caixa Tem smartphone app, and funds were distributed via the same app. As of Aug. 5, 2020, 66 million people had received Coronavouchers via the Caix Tem app. Of those, 36 million were previously unbanked.
- Merenda em Casa (“snack at home”), a program run by state governments, distributed funds to low-income families with children at public schools to help them pay for food while schools were closed due to COVID-19. The program distributed funds via PicPay and PagBank’s PagSeguro, both private-sector payment apps.
Following the launch of Pix, the central bank-run RTP program was made available to clients of Caixa Tem, PicPay, and PagBank. As a result, previously unbanked individuals who had become banked because of the Coronavoucher and Merenda em Casa programs were able to obtain and use Pix keys to send and receive payments.
It remains unclear, however, what proportion of those previously unbanked individuals actually use Pix. As Figure 1 below shows, the number of Pix keys registered vastly outstrips the number of users. As such, not only is it false to claim that Pix helped reduce the number of unbanked Brazilians, but it isn’t possible to say with certainty how many of those previously unbanked individuals are now active users of Pix.
FIGURE 1: Pix Keys Registered to Natural Persons and Pix Users Who Are Natural Persons
Pix-Created Problems
Pix suffered a series of data breaches this past year, with the end result that details of Pix accounts were stolen from more than 500,000 account holders. Meanwhile, hackers have set up fake apps designed to steal money from users’ bank accounts by masquerading as legitimate Pix-compliant wallets. And Pix has been associated with a rise in lightning kidnappings, whereby kidnappers force their victims to make a transfer on Pix in order to be released.
Faced with the problem that they cannot avoid having Pix because their banks have automatically enabled the system, some Brazilians have responded to the threat of kidnappings by purchasing second “Pix phones.” Users load these mid-range Android phones with banking and Pix apps and leave them at home. Meanwhile, they delete all banking apps from their primary phone. While such an approach ostensibly prevents criminals from stealing potentially large amounts of money from individuals who can afford to have a second phone, it is quite a costly and inconvenient solution.
Pix vs Credit Cards
Roberto Campos Neto reportedly conceded that Pix data breaches will occur “with some frequency.” This acknowledgment of Pix’s unresolved security issues is difficult to square with the central bank president’s claim that the service will soon replace credit cards. After all, the major credit-card networks (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover) have more than half a century of experience managing fraud, and have built massive artificial-intelligence-based systems to identify and prevent potentially fraudulent transactions. Pix has no such system. Credit-card networks have also developed a highly effective system for challenging fraudulent transactions called “chargebacks.”
Card networks’ investment in fraud management has enabled them to offer “zero liability” terms to cardholders, which has made credit cards attractive as a means of paying for goods and services, both at brick-and-mortar locations and online. While Pix now has a system to reverse fraudulent transactions, its reliability has yet to be tested, and Pix as yet does not offer zero liability. Thus, given the choice between a credit card and Pix, users are unlikely to use Pix to pay for goods where there is a risk that the business will fail to deliver goods or services as promised.
Finally, credit cards offer users the ability to defer payment for no fee until their next bill becomes due (usually at least a month). And they offer the ability to defer payment for longer, if necessary, with interest payable on the amount outstanding.
Conclusion: There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch
The investments that credit-card networks have made in the identification, prevention, and rectification of fraud have been possible because they are able to charge a (very small) fee to process transactions. Pix also charges merchants a small fee for transactions but, as noted, it is not able to offer the same protections.
Most Pix transactions to date have been person-to-person (P2P), effectively replacing transactions that would have otherwise been made with cash, checks, or online bank-to-bank funds transfers. That makes sense when one thinks about the risks involved. P2P transactions are likely to involve parties that know one another and/or are engaged in repeat business. By contrast, many consumer-to-business and business-to-business transactions involve parties that are relatively less well-known to one another and thus have more incentive to renege on commitments. Consumers are therefore more inclined to use the payment system with protections built in, while merchants—who are happy for the additional business—are willing to pay the price for that business.
The science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein popularized a pithy phrase to describe the idea that it is not possible to get something for nothing: “There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.” If Pix is to challenge credit cards as a real consumer-payments system, it will have to offer similar levels of fraud protection to consumers. That will not be cheap. While the central bank might continue to subsidize Pix transactions, doing so to the degree that would be necessary to offer such fraud protections would be an abuse of its position. Thinking otherwise is science fiction.