While the Brazilian consumer sees the convenience of paying with a QR code or a tap on their phone, a structural change is happening behind the scenes in the financial industry. A silent but radical transition is underway: the migration from a model based on private networks and percentage fees per transaction to a new logic of infrastructure that is open, interoperable, and instant.
At the center of this transition is Pix. But the impact is not just technological or operational—it’s strategic because it alters the balance of power across the entire payments chain, especially the role of card networks.
The machinery of card networks
To understand what’s at stake, it’s necessary to grasp the traditional architecture of card payments. Every time a purchase is made with a physical or virtual card, various actors in the payment chain come into play:
- The cardholder, who makes the payment;
- The merchant, who receives it;
- The acquirer, which processes the transaction (such as Cielo and Stone);
- The issuer, usually a bank, which issued the card;
- The card network (Visa, Mastercard, and others), which connects all the points.
Card networks do not issue cards nor process transactions directly. Their role is to orchestrate the network: defining interoperability rules, ensuring financial settlement between participants, and maintaining the infrastructure that allows a card issued anywhere in the world to work wherever it’s accepted.
For this, each transaction generates a series of fees, distributed along the chain. Among them:
- Interchange fee: from the merchant to the issuer;
- MDR (Merchant Discount Rate): commission paid to the acquirer;
- Assessment fee: direct remuneration for the card network;
- Other auxiliary fees: antifraud, clearing, settlement, etc.
It’s a sophisticated, convenient, and efficient model—but also expensive and not very transparent, especially for the end of the chain: the consumer holding the card.
The disruption brought by Pix and infrastructure as sovereignty
Pix drastically simplifies this model because with it, the payer initiates the transaction directly in their bank’s app, the recipient receives the funds in seconds, there are no intermediaries like acquirers or card networks, and settlement happens in real time between bank accounts via the Central Bank’s infrastructure.
Pix is just the tip of the iceberg of a financial architecture designed with technical rigor, institutional coordination, and long-term vision.
It works because it was designed as a platform, not a product, allowing banks, fintechs, and even companies to create value on top of it. And it operates in real time, 24/7, with practically negligible marginal cost. This isn’t a subsidy—it’s advanced financial engineering vision.
The result? A deep cut into the margins of traditional networks, where every transaction migrating from cards to Pix represents an operation that no longer passes through the machinery of card networks and their partners.
Thus, there’s less revenue from interchange, less dependence on issuers, and less volume for acquirers.
Moreover, with the advancement of solutions like Scheduled Pix, Guaranteed Pix, and payment initiation APIs, even typical credit card functions are beginning to be replicated outside the traditional card logic.
What does this mean for the market?
The impact is not trivial. Traditional infrastructure was built for a world where settlement happened at a slower speed, risk was high, and interoperability was difficult. Card networks solved this problem by creating global, reliable, and scalable networks—and were largely successful in this mission.
But the context has changed.
With the modernization of banking systems, advances in cloud computing, open finance, and pro-competitive regulation, it’s now possible to replicate much of the functionality of card networks with lighter, cheaper, and more open structures.
And this change is accelerated by the data itself:
- Over 160 million Brazilians already use Pix;
- It has surpassed debit and credit cards in transaction volume in many segments;
- New entrants (like fintechs and platforms) are choosing Pix as the default, not an alternative.
Does this mean the end of card networks?
No, but it means their role is being redefined. Card networks are still essential for certain functions, such as: international transactions, loyalty programs and revolving credit, operations in markets with low banking interoperability, and use cases where risk needs to be absorbed by multiple agents.
But their central and mandatory position in the payments chain is being challenged. And this requires a reinvention of models—not just commercial ones, but especially technological infrastructure.
The battle for the invisible layer
Card networks still dominate areas like installment payments, international credit, and loyalty networks. But this is also changing. Scheduled Pix is beginning to compete with installments. Open APIs allow fintechs to replicate rewards logic. Financial intermediation is being reprogrammed line by line.
And the more governments and companies understand that financial infrastructure is a matter of sovereignty and economic efficiency, the more we’ll see local alternatives replacing bloated global models built over decades of rent-seeking.
At the end of the day, this isn’t a clash between public and private, but between old and new. Between closed architecture and interoperable platforms. Every time a new transaction happens via Pix, a piece of the old order dissolves into code.
What’s at stake is who occupies the invisible layer that moves money—a layer dominated for decades by large global private networks. Now, we’re beginning to see that it’s possible to build more open, interoperable, and efficient alternatives.
And perhaps this is Pix’s greatest legacy: not just proving that infrastructure innovation is possible, but that it can generate inclusion, efficiency, and scale when designed with architectural clarity and a focus on interoperability.
The new battle is over this layer. Whoever defines the standards defines the future. And every transaction that stops passing through a card and happens in an open system is, quietly, a piece of this new infrastructure taking shape.
