Brazil's Pix is a Huge Success, Mexico's CoDi Not So Much

Here’s a tale of two government-led fintech platforms. The goal of both are similar — to facilitate digital payments amongst a largely unbanked population. However, results have been vastly different. Pix, Brazil’s platform was launched on Nov. 2020 and now has 118M confirmed users, which represents 55% of the country’s population. CoDi, Mexico’s equivalent, was launched more than a year earlier, on Sep. 2019 and has gotten 11M confirmed accounts to sign up, or 8% of the population.

How did this happen? First, there’s a key difference between the two. Pix works both between individuals and businesses, while CoDi is only used for transactions between businesses and individuals. Pix also had a key incentive going in: During the pandemic, the Brazilian government said it would send its emergency cash payments to 30M+ people, only through the platform.

Additionally, policymakers have made sure that it’s free and very easy to setup. They’ve worked with many banks and fintech firms in the country to join the platform. The result has been nothing short of a slamdunk; according to MasterCard, Brazil reduced its unbanked population by 73% and in Q4 of 2021, $3.8B in payments were processed through Pix.