Pix Redraws Cross-Border Payments as PagBrasil Connects Argentina

Brazil’s Pix real-time payments network already moves more money than cards or cash in Latin America’s largest economy. Now, the same digital rails that let Brazilians scan a QR code to pay a beach vendor or a department store are being extended to millions of Argentines, who will be able to use Pix in Brazil and in every country where the system is accepted.

PagBrasil, a Brazilian digital payments company, and COELSA, the technology hub for Argentina’s banking system, Friday (Dec. 12) announced an agreement that lets Argentine banks and digital wallets enable Pix directly inside their apps. That means Argentines will be able to pay with Pix in Brazil and in other Pix-enabled markets such as Uruguay, Chile, Peru, Spain, Portugal and the United States, using the same banking app or digital wallet they use at home. Pix payments will be available to customers of 37 Argentine banks that use COELSA’s services, with rollout starting at a few institutions and expanding over the coming months.

From the user’s perspective, the experience is designed to be almost invisible. An Argentine tourist pays in Brazil exactly as a Brazilian would: by scanning a Pix QR code at the point of sale or entering a Pix key, then confirming the transaction in their banking app. PagBrasil’s platform performs real-time currency conversion so the Brazilian merchant sees the price in real, while the tourist sees the amount in pesos or dollars and authorizes it in their local app. The funds are debited instantly from the tourist’s bank account, and the merchant receives the money in real time.

“Argentines are big travelers,” PagBrasil CEO and Co-Founder Ralf Germer told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster in an interview, adding that about 4 million Argentines will travel to Brazil this year, and they spent about $3.3 billion in Brazil last year alone. That spend is set against a surge in inbound tourism. More than 8 million foreign visitors entered Brazil between January and November 2025, with Argentina accounting for roughly 40% of them. For Germer, enabling those travelers to pay the way Brazilians already do is less about novelty than about fixing a daily pain point.

Pockets of Cash

Today, many Argentines still arrive in Brazil with pockets full of cash because international card usage is both expensive and constrained. The Argentine government levies around a 30% tax on foreign card purchases, making cards unattractive for routine spending abroad. Cash, meanwhile, is risky to carry and easy to run out of midway through a trip.

“At the end, tourism is all about people spending money,” Germer said. “There is a friction, there is a barrier, and this is what we are solving.” He expects the Pix option to change behavior: “People will spend more because there are no constraints now. No limit of cash, no limit of a credit card.”

He already sees a pattern in how travelers adopt Pix Roaming, which allows foreign tourists to use Pix. “People love using it,” Germer said. “Users start by buying a coffee, some small item, to check that the service really works. And then they start to pay everything with Pix when they travel to Brazil — breakfast, coffee on the road, lunch, the hotel, dinner, the ice cream at the beach, everything.”

The promise is that Argentines will be able to treat Brazil like an extension of their domestic payments environment. Travelers will not need to preregister or open a special account. As soon as their bank switches on Pix via COELSA, customers can board a flight with only their phone. When they land in Brazil, banks can use geolocation to push a notification that Pix payments are available. From there, paying at a beach kiosk, a hotel front desk or an eCommerce checkout looks and feels like any other local account-to-account transfer.

“The user doesn’t need to do anything,” Germer said. “They travel with their phone, and when they arrive in Brazil the bank can send a notification saying they can do Pix payments, and they just use their bank account for digital payments as they do at home.”

Clearing and Settlement

Behind that simple front end sits a fairly intricate clearing and settlement setup. When a tourist pays, the merchant’s point-of-sale system displays the price in Brazilian real. The QR code data is routed to PagBrasil, which converts the amount in real to Argentine pesos or U.S. dollars at a real-time FX rate and returns the local-currency amount to the tourist’s banking app for approval. Once the customer confirms, PagBrasil instantly confirms the payment to the merchant and credits the merchant in real, while handling the cross-border settlement with partners in Argentina in the background.

“We confirm the payment and settle with the merchant in real time,” Germer said. “The merchant gets his money in real time, and the Argentine tourist is also debited in real time.”

On fraud and security, Germer argues that Pix has structural advantages over cards. Pix transactions are push payments with no chargeback mechanism; once the transaction is authenticated and completed, it cannot be reversed. That limits classic card-not-present chargeback abuse, though it does not eliminate merchant fraud or account takeover risks. Any Pix transaction, including those initiated by Argentines, must be authenticated using the same credentials that protect a user’s banking app, such as biometrics or passwords. Brazilian banks often requiring facial recognition for higher-value transactions.

“Any Pix transaction can only be concluded with authentication,” Germer said. He added that fraud levels “with Pix in general are significantly lower than with card payments, even compared with 3D Secure.”

Merchant Economics

The economics are also designed to be familiar to merchants already accepting Pix domestically. PagBrasil positions itself as the cross-border bridge rather than the merchant acquirer. Merchants stay connected to their existing Pix acceptance providers, which set the merchant discount rate. “We don’t charge the merchants,” Germer said, noting that PagBrasil’s role is only to move money between countries and currencies. Consumers are not charged fees for using Pix abroad; PagBrasil instead applies a small markup to the FX rate, which Germer said is still more competitive than exchanging cash or paying with cards.

The partnership with COELSA is also a step toward a broader vision of interoperability among domestic real-time payment schemes in Latin America and beyond. Brazil’s Pix has more than 178 million users and is used by about 95% of the country’s adults, accounting for over half of all payment transactions in the second quarter of 2025. Other countries in the region are building their own instant payment systems for reasons ranging from financial inclusion to regulatory control. Germer believes those systems will remain domestic in governance but must be connected in practice so people can travel and pay seamlessly across borders.

“We clearly see the demand for interconnecting other countries as well,” he said, pointing to future plans to let Argentines use their domestic accounts to pay QR codes not just in Brazil but also in Paraguay, Colombia or Peru.

If the model sounds familiar, that is partly by design. Webster openly compared PagBrasil’s Pix Roaming strategy to Ant Group’s cross-border Alipay Plus wallet network in Asia, which lets travelers spend with their home wallet in multiple countries. He recalled traveling in China before such services were available, when merchants often would not accept cash and card acceptance was limited.

“Having this solution is fantastic,” he said. “We believe that other regions of the world will have a similar situation in future, where digital payments are the only option, and foreigners also need to pay when they come to that country.”

What PagBrasil is building with COELSA is, in his telling, an acceptance network for instant payments that mirrors the ubiquity of cards while solving for different constraints: cash dependence, high FX costs and the growing spread of local real-time payment systems.

“Under the hood it’s really complex,” Germer said, “but the user experience is fantastic because it’s extremely easy. It’s just opening an option on your phone, scanning the QR code, reading the amount in your currency, confirming, and you walk away.”