Brazil was country with the 8th-most real-time financial transactions in 2020

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The launch of PIX, the instant payment system led by the Central Bank more than four months ago, has made Brazil climb one position among the ten countries that generated the most real-time transactions last year, reaching the eighth place and surpassing the United States, which was in ninth place.

There were 1.3 billion transactions in 2020, a 58% increase over those recorded in 2019, a new global report from ACI Worldwide and GlobalData, anticipated to Valor, shows.

Among the 48 markets surveyed globally, more than 70.3 billion real-time payment transactions were processed in 2020, a 41% rise. India is in first position, with 25.5 billion real-time payment transactions, followed by China, with 15.7 billion. South Korea comes third with 6 billion, Thailand fourth with 5.2 billion, and the UK fifth with 2.8 billion.

In sixth place is Nigeria, with 1.9 billion transactions; and in seventh place is Japan, with 1.7 billion transactions. With Brazil in eighth place and the USA in ninth (with 1.2 billion transactions), Mexico’s top 10 is completed with 942 million transactions.

The survey considers all instantaneous financial movements between bank accounts as real-time transactions. In Brazil, besides PIX, there is the Electronic Available Transfer (TED) launched in 2002. The Central Bank created both.

The difference is that while PIX operates 24 hours a day every day of the week, including weekends and holidays, TED operates during bank hours from Monday to Friday. Also, there are no fees charged to individuals for PIX transactions, while for TED, the cost is determined by the bank.

ACI’s global CEO Odilon Almeida evaluates that the growth of almost 60% of the transactions in Brazil is surprising. According to him, aftermarket novelties, it is more common for transactions to rise around 40%. The PIX’s acceptance explains this movement, but the social isolation, due to the pandemic also had a great contribution.

According to the ICA, with millions of people worldwide having to change the way they work and live – how they shop and pay – the adoption of mobile wallets had a historical global growth of 46%, and in Brazil, this percentage reached 61%. Almeida says that, culturally, Brazilians are more used to accepting novelties with real-time transactions, an inheritance from the times of extremely high inflation, with oscillations in minutes.

As the pandemic, still very much present, has started to stimulate behavioral changes in consumers and businesses, the report points out that banks, merchants, and intermediaries, i.e., the entire payment ecosystem, have responded quickly to the new challenges, shifting to digital to protect and enhance current revenue streams, and seeking revenue alternatives through a fully digitized customer experience.

Thus, countries with a robust digital payments infrastructure already in place were better able to cope with the economic effects of the pandemic, according to Jeremy Wilmot, product director at ACI Worldwide.

As this acceptance movement is expected to be continuous, including in Brazil, the research foresees an annual growth rate for the volume of real-time payment transactions of 23.6% from 2020 to 2025, on average worldwide. In Brazil’s case, the estimate is an increase of 25.3% per year in these five years.

Almeida evaluates that digital payments like the PIX should revolutionize the market just like cards (debit and credit) did 40, 50 years ago. He says that with the culture change driven by the pandemic and the speed in creating new forms of payment provided by technology, this segment’s dissemination may occur in ten years.

According to the survey, the share of real-time operations in global electronic transactions in 2020 was 9.8%, against 7.6% in 2019. In Brazil, this share was 3.5% in 2020, up from 2.3% in 2019.

The value of transactions increased 32.8% from 2019 to 2020, rising from US$69 trillion to US$92 trillion worldwide. In Brazil, the advance was 12%, to US$1.66 trillion.

But globally, incidents of fraud associated with real-time payments continue to increase as fraudsters tend to target new channels. Also, cards reported growth in the number of problems suffered by consumers. In Brazil, it has not been any different. According to the study, some 17.6% were victims of fraud in real-time payment transactions in the last four years.

Source: Valor