Payments in Brazil
Brazil is unique in its level of card usage for consumer payments, Ccmpared to similar GDP per capita countries.
After working on Google Pay Africa, I started working on the Google Pay API globally and Brazil was a top focus market. These were (just a few of) the surprises about consumer payments in Brazil for me.
Cards are king
Card usage offline and online is higher than cash; for no other market across the Global South (LatAm, SE Asia, India, or SSA) is the true (cash is always the highest form of payment online). Some reasons for this:
Low security (historically) makes people not like cash so no one wants to be carrying cash which will make them a target
High inflation (historically) makes people not like cash + want to leverage credit so consumers are very keen to keep their cash in a form where it can be growing interest + use credit cards that defer the time to pay. This consumer desire pushed merchants to take on the cost and headache of accepting cards, while in other similar GDP/capita markets this desire wasn't strong enoug for merchants to take that pill.
“Lower” cost of card PoS devices - acqirers in Brazil also did a good job getting adoption of PoS devices by offering them for free but then just putting this cost into the MDR (so still having to pay for it like in other markets, but this gets built into the costs rather than being transparent). This is common theme in Brazilian financial services (a lot of things seemingly being free but they're just built into prices).
Majority of Brazilians have credit cards
This is also quite unique to Brazil. Banks/issuers in other global south markets struggle to provide this level of coverage, not able to understand credit worthiness or willing to take this risk. Neobanks like Nubank get a lot of credit for this improvement, as the percentage of Brazilians with credit cards rose from 50% in 2015 to 80% today, driven by Nubank and other digital banks who took a more savvy approach.
Additionally, Brazilian credit card issuers offer up to 12x monthly installments to consumers and merchants often cover the cost of this. This is well known to anyone familiar with Brazil but calling it out for those that aren't and explaining a bit more how it works. Because of hyperinflation and other factors in the 1980s, Brazilian banks/issuers (with some pressure from the central bank though the history here is a little fuzzy to me) started to offer the ability for consumers to choose to break a purchase into installments, generally always allowing up to 12 months. The cost of providing this longer repayment period is passed to the merchant, where the MDR they pay gets higher for the higher number of installments chosen by the consumer. Merchants then decided if they want to overtly cover this cost to help make the sale or overly pass some of it onto the consumer (eg you can pay R$100 for the item in up to 3x or if you want 4x it's R$130). Of course, the entire cost gets passed on the consumer in the end through prices being higher; and basically the consumers not using installments are subsidizing those that are.
Pix is replacing debit card usage but hasn't touched credit card usage (yet)
This is largely because Pix doesn't offer the benefits of a credit card (credit, rewards, fraud protection). Pix offers the same benefits as debit cards to the consumer and it's much more attractive to the merchant (lower MDR than debit cards) and issuers (don't have to take on fraud liability, like with debit cards). So you've seen Pix showing up in many cases:
Online B2C payments: Because debit cards largely aren't accepted online by merchants and consumers don't want to use up their credit limit in many cases, Pix has had a huge himpact on online B2C payments, now making up over 25% of online B2C TPV, just under credit cards at 39% TPV and way above debit cards at 15% TPV. Debit cards haven't been accepted online because issuers make the consumer jump through a lot of card ownership verification hoops that will tank conversion rates. So merchants just stopped offering it.
In-person B2C payments: Here they want to save on costs and ask the user to pay by Pix, sometimes offering a discount to encourage them to do so. Consumers sometimes don't like this because they have to take their phones out, scan the QR code, etc with the risk of their phone being snatched in the process.