Announcements

Today we officially launch the CTPI Membership! We want to thank all our beta testers for their support and feedback. We hope to keep seeing you around post-launch. Here we go!

From the Research Hub

Today we are making a CTPI Weekly special edition to celebrate the publication of Lessons from Pix: How to Build a Real-Time Payments Platform at its Full Potential.

Lessons From Pix is CTPI's first white paper and our contribution to the international debate about real-time payments. In this issue, we take the opportunity to present a summary of our paper to our members.

Intro

Pix, the real-time payments rail created by the Brazilian Central Bank, has gained notoriety for its impressive numbers, including over 148 million unique users and 8 billion transactions in the last three months alone. Its systemic effects are also significant, including a 10% reduction in total cash circulation and increased financial inclusion. Our paper provides a comprehensive deep dive into Pix's design and protocol, highlighting critical decisions and tradeoffs and providing recommendations for other countries building fast payment systems.

Properties and platforms: a high-level view of Pix

Pix operates 24/7/365, settles transactions in less than 10 seconds, and is government-driven. Pix is highly reliable, cost-effective, and standardized, with a minimum user experience standard on all PSPs. Pix is also data-rich, extensible, and ubiquitous, with over 90% of all active Brazilian accounts linked to Pix.

In our paper, we suggest Pix was built as a platform, not a specific product implementation, accommodating every payment method in Brazil at the time of launch and any other that might come to play after. The true strength of Pix comes from the Brazilian Central Bank's approach that centralized the infrastructure, favored open-source protocols, created a messaging abstraction, and embedded best practices of distributed systems in the system design and protocol.

Payment flow: proposals for the evolution of Pix and other RTP systems

Our white paper proposes that Pix's payment flow could be improved by allowing Payee PSPs to block transfers for other reasons beyond the limited list provided by BCB, allowing payers to input information on additional fields in Dynamic QR Codes, creating a standard for redirect links for mobile payments, and relying more heavily on URIs to simplify payment initiation. These improvements were left out of Pix by the Brazilian Central Bank but could be incorporated into new payment rails with little additional specification efforts.

Membership launch and Lessons from Pix publication