ECB and Pix Could Connect Europe to Brazil’s Instant Payments
Hey Payments Fanatic!
What if sending money between Europe and Brazil could become as easy as sending an instant payment locally? 👀
The ECB is now assessing whether its TIPS instant payment platform could be linked with Brazil’s Pix.
If it happens, the two systems could enable faster and potentially cheaper instant payments between the euro area and Brazil, connecting two very different payment ecosystems through their existing infrastructure.
And the scale of Pix makes this especially interesting: Brazil’s system processes around 250 million instant payments every day, with transactions settled directly in central bank money.
It’s still only a feasibility assessment, so there’s no link yet. But the direction is clear: instant payment systems are increasingly being connected across borders rather than operating as isolated domestic networks.
And with the ECB also exploring links with systems such as India’s UPI and Switzerland’s instant payment infrastructure, cross-border instant payments are becoming a much bigger part of the payments conversation.
Before we wrap up, let’s take a look at how listed Payments companies performed over the past week.
Here’s what else is happening in payments today👇
See you tomorrow!
Cheers,
HOW PAYMENTS PERFORMED LAST WEEK
📈 Here’s how listed Payments companies performed over the past week:
NEWS
🇺🇸 LoanPro launches a virtual Mastercard for in-house payment processing for lenders, enabling them to issue cards directly within their lending infrastructure. The product aims to streamline payment processing for lenders by keeping card issuance and loan servicing on a single platform.
🇺🇸 Limited closes an $18.5M seed round preempted by Third Prime, less than 10 months after launch. The company offers multi-region business accounts and payments across the US, EU, UK, LATAM, and Africa, with North Island Ventures doubling down alongside new investors including ParaFi Capital and Digital Currency Group.
🇪🇺 ECB to assess feasibility of interlinking with Brazil's Pix, the instant payment system processing roughly 250 million daily transactions. The ECB will explore technical, operational, legal and business considerations for connecting TIPS with Pix to enable faster, lower cost cross-border payments between the euro area and Brazil.
🌍 Meta's Muse made agent payments a mass market product, but liability questions around autonomous AI transactions have not kept pace. A Finextra analysis examines the regulatory gaps emerging as AI agents begin executing payments at scale without clear frameworks for accountability.
🇵🇱 BLIK joins dynamic payment methods on Stripe, enabling merchants in over 30 countries to automatically offer BLIK to Polish shoppers. BLIK accounts for more than 70% of Polish e-commerce transactions and can now be displayed at checkout based on user location and payment context without separate integrations.
🇺🇸 Slash introduces payment processing to help merchants accept debit and credit card payments, partnering with Whop to power the underlying infrastructure. The feature launches via native card acceptance in Slash Invoicing and an SDK for custom checkout flows, with settlement and merchant onboarding handled by Whop.
🇺🇸 Corpay expands its AI agent team inside Corpay Complete, adding purpose-built agents across corporate, fleet and vendor payments. Each agent handles a specific task with finance-grade controls, building on the AI Virtual Assistant and Agent Card launched earlier this year.
🇺🇸 FedNow opens the door to cross-border instant payments, marking the system's first expansion beyond U.S. borders since its 2023 launch. Banks and credit unions will be able to serve customers whose payments involve parties outside the U.S., with FedNow handling the domestic leg of each transaction.
🌐 AxLabs releases Simple Agent Wallet for autonomous AI payments across EVM, Solana and Hedera blockchains using the x402 payment protocol. The open-source CLI tool lets AI agents inspect and execute payments without human intervention, removing friction from browser-based confirmation flows.
🇩🇪 Jochen Siegert joins Green Banana as an advisor, bringing payments expertise to the Frankfurt FinTech as it builds out its European BNPL infrastructure. Siegert and Laura Treude will support the company's market standard strategy for Buy Now Pay Later.
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