Pix Brasil: Technology transfers from central banks. Financial inclusion or geopolitics?

Publicado en Legal Today el 14.05.2026

Joãozinho is a street child who sells candy to drivers in the chaotic traffic of a Brazilian city to survive. Far from school, he risks his life dodging cars and hanging small bags of sweets from the side mirrors of vehicles during the 90 seconds it takes for a traffic light to turn red. Like so many other impoverished Brazilian children who suffer the same ordeal, each bag has a piece of paper stapled to it with a QR code, “PIX,” so that any driver who decides to take it and drives off when the light changes will remember to make a bank transfer of 5 reais—almost one euro—to the supposed account of his mother, but which could very well be that of the candy supplier. A couple of years earlier, with less inflation, he would get two 2-real bills that he would put in his pocket. The only thing invented here is the child's name.

Forced transfer of the PIX.

PIX is an electronic bank transfer system designed by the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB) in 2016 and launched on November 16, 2020. The heads of the BCB's Financial Market Structure Department, Carlos Eduardo Brandt and Angelo Duarte, implemented PIX, introducing instant bank transactions. BCB Resolution No. 1 of August 12, 2020, initiated a regulatory process to mandate PIX among private banks, arguing that it would eliminate slower electronic payment methods and offer a free service to individuals, thereby bringing banking services to millions of Brazilians. Article 3 mandated its implementation for financial institutions with more than 500,000 active accounts. In 2024, BCB Resolution 403 extended the mandatory implementation to all entities, amending the previous resolution.

Source codes of a Central Bank.

The convergence towards digitalization is not simply about adopting new technologies. To respond to the dynamics and stability of the financial market, central banks must guarantee trust and transparency, rapidly assimilating changes in digital assets and acting as catalysts for innovation (fintech) and regulatory communication (regtech).

Central banks publicly share—and internationally with other central banks—the source code of their operational models to control their development. The transparency of these models varies considerably among central banks and is legally known as a technology transfer involving the internalization and exchange of scientific codes. Reproducibility and replicability are legal mechanisms for aligning with best practices and modernizing financial regulations.

This intellectual dissemination of code creates a risky international collaboration. Therefore, central banks publicly report on existing operating systems, but they do not create them. They share simulations to facilitate understanding and projection of electronic transactions. Among the Brazilian rules for PIX, we find a veritable mandatory licensing scheme with brand usage manuals, implementation guidelines, and even a dispute resolution mechanism. The PIX source code is owned by the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB) after being built using freely available code such as Red Hat, Apache Kafka, and Kubernetes. In 2022, the BCB president announced that its source code would be shared internationally; however, the source code is protected for reasons of national security and financial integrity.                    

BRICS Geopolitics - Pay.

Envisioned as a borderless financial freedom initiative, BrICS-pay.com is a decentralized blockchain payment platform developed by the BRICS Business Council, comprised of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, to circumvent the use of the US dollar for both individuals and businesses. PIX transferred its technology to this consortium without any financial commitment, essentially as an open-source technology. BrICS-pay is governed by a Council of Plenipotentiary Representatives that approves areas of activity, admits participants, raises funds, creates advisory groups, and regulates both free and paid payments.

Brics-Pay follows the cooperative legal architecture of SWIFT and MBridge (China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and the UAE). MBridge reached an operational level in 2024, sufficient to explore the creation of a digital currency among central banks to dedollarize international trade. SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) has led a similar cooperative structure since 1973, with more than 11,000 financial institutions operating on over 200 technology networks. It constitutes a financial messaging mechanism without the physical movement of cash; its users send the funds. Headquartered in Belgium and governed by Belgian and international law, and adhering to ISO 20022 technical standards, it reports payments in various currencies, including USD, HKD, Euro, GBP, JPY, CNY, CHF, AUD, CAD, and SGD.

Technology transfer that violates international trade.

The forced transfer of PIX technology from the BCB to financial institutions in Brazil has been made available to BRICS-Pay as if it were open source, to collaborate on a geopolitical project, to compete with SWIFT instead of enabling its operation for currencies such as the Real or the Yuan, for example.

In July 2025, the United States Office of International Trade (USTR) initiated an investigation into the illegal practice of using PIX as a discriminatory barrier to other electronic payment mechanisms in Brazil, such as credit cards, Google Pay, and Apple Pay. This issue is currently the subject of negotiations between the two governments. Open access to the technology—and the data of Brazilians—contained by PIX is invaluable. The operational cost of PIX is minimal.

Under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, the United States seeks to determine how PIX interferes with intellectual property rights, electronic payment services, and anti-corruption, in order to protect both social media companies and financial institutions.

Many central banks and international financial institutions develop, register, and transfer financial infrastructure technology and digital assets. They do so in a closed-source manner, like the Chinese E-CNY, but with the aim of backing a digital currency with fiat currency. Electronic payment software operates within associations formed by financial entities of all types and, naturally, the central bank—often created by law and supervised by the government—which proposes an operational membership system. This is not the legal structure that manages PIX.

And Joãozinho?

160 million Brazilians use the PIX card, which has modernized their spending habits. For Joaozinho, it certainly changed his life, even though he no longer sees banknotes. The Federal Revenue Service assures that it does not use individual data, and the government maintains that it will not be available to private companies either. Financial inclusion remains a distant legal concept, and the intellectual property of the PIX card is a strategic asset of the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB).

We are initiating a global debate on the intellectual property rights of digital systems belonging to autonomous entities. The geopolitics of their technological transfer challenges the central bank's independence, but Joaozinho doesn't seem to care. In June 2025, Brazil's Supreme Federal Court held Meta, X, WhatsApp, Google, and other platforms liable for content and user management in Brazil, contradicting the liability shield and good Samaritan principles that govern in the United States (Section 230 of 47 USC of 1996), which obligate them to remove racist content, hate speech, and incitement to violence. If PIX user data also belongs to the BCB, this intellectual property could violate constitutional and federal rights.

It is concerning that the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB) transferred the PIX technology to the BRICS countries but failed to implement it within Mercosur, for example, which also suffers from a lack of financial inclusion. To date, PIX has been operating in Uruguay since 2023 through a private commercial agreement between PagBrasil and Plexo. In Argentina, Banco Patagonia uses a similar system to purchase Brazilian reais through an agreement with Banco do Brasil. In October 2025, Bre-B (Breve), an agreement between the Central Bank of Colombia and the BCB, was launched. Comparing the supposed interest in financial inclusion with the international transfer of PIX technology reveals a geopolitical and powerfully self-regulated digital tool capable of absorbing private financial data and managing it with questionable intellectual property protection.