I worked in a bank in Brazil in the early 2000s. Bank transfers were always easy and relatively quick. At worst, transfers would happen overnight during a national event called bank compensation where all banks would sync up with the Central Bank.

Pix solved a bunch of problems and made all of the above quicker and easier, but Brazil has been at the forefront of banking systems for a long time.

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augusto-moura 4 hours ago | parent [-]

We had TED, but it was not instant, nor was it free. It only worked on working hours and took a maximum of 1h, still better than American banks, though. QR Codes is also a big deal.

The deployment of PIX was also really well executed, if it took too much I'm 100% sure that Visa and Master would've made it worse. Being quick was a wise decision

	▲	cassianoleal 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> We had TED, but it was not instant, nor was it free. Not instant, but pretty close for the time. It might not have been free but most basic bank packages had a bunch of TED transfers included. For everything else, there was still DOC which would happen overnight and was either free or cheaper than TED. I'm not dissing Pix in any way. Pix is probably the most advanced transfers and payments system in the world, and I'm 100% with you on how well it was (and still is) executed. I was mostly responding to: > how difficult it was to transfer money before Pix, even between local banks. It was certainly not. I remember being in the UK a couple years after I was on that bank, and being shocked at how primitive everything related to banking was. Transfers would take days or even weeks and would be incredibly awkward to make. Cheques were the quickest way to transfer money between people - other than cash, obviously, but that was not always desired. A few years later I visited the US and it was even more retrograde than what I had seen in the UK all those years before.