PIX and Stablecoins Are Not Rivals, Says Visa’s Digital Currencies Chief for Latin America
Stablecoins didn’t arrive to combat PIX. That was the message from Antônia Souza, Visa’s Director of Digital Currencies for Latin America and the Caribbean, on Latam Desk, the BeInCrypto podcast hosted by Luis Magalhães, the corporate’s regional lead. “We are steady cash are usually not right here to combat towards PIX”, she mentioned, pushing again on a framing that has change into widespread throughout the area.
In her view, the 2 serve totally different jobs. PIX is constructed for real-time on a regular basis funds, whereas stablecoins are meant for cross-border flows, corresponding to sending cash overseas or storing {dollars} extra simply. She famous that Visa has been creating the Visa Connector, a cost initiator that helps provoke PIX transactions, exactly as a result of the corporate sees the instant-payment rail and the stablecoin rail as complementary fairly than competing.
The exception, Souza mentioned, is international locations with out a huge instant-payment system. In Colombia, a peso-backed stablecoin helps individuals make immediate funds as a result of they lack an answer on the size of Brazil’s PIX. Elsewhere, she careworn, most stablecoin exercise runs on USD stablecoins and is targeted on cross-border transactions, not day by day routine spending.
Not all the pieces must be a stablecoin
Souza was agency that the know-how shouldn’t be pressured into each use case.
“I’m completely towards that kind of strategy”, she mentioned, criticizing market makes an attempt to use stablecoins to all the pieces.
Her viewpoint, which she mentioned she pushes with Visa’s personal purchasers, is to focus on the issues solely stablecoins can resolve, arguing that focus alone opens a big sufficient market to work with.
She underlined a knowledge level that captures Brazil’s moment: the nation now has extra crypto traders than its B3 inventory trade. Adoption within the area, she mentioned, is pushed by each regulation and precise utilization, with Brazil, Mexico and Argentina among the many largest markets even towards the worldwide common.
The panorama stays uneven, she added, with some international locations nonetheless barring monetary establishments from working with crypto whereas Brazil advances its framework.
Visa because the bridge for banks
Much of the interview centered on Visa’s function connecting conventional establishments to the know-how. Souza mentioned she has been speaking with main banks from Brazil to the Caribbean, and that curiosity is actual, however so are the doubts, about integrating with legacy techniques, defending towards fraud and scams, and controlling the supply of funds. Because Visa has engaged with crypto for greater than ten years, the technique is to combine stablecoins into its networks and provide banks a path that’s “already scalable, that’s already trustable by the market, by the ecosystem”.
She additionally agreed with Visa CPO Jack Forestell that stablecoins are gaining significant traction whereas nonetheless not being plug-and-play for funds.
“It wants interoperability, safety, compliance, infrastructure capabilities. And this isn’t one thing that’s fairly prepared but”, she mentioned.
A $7 billion pilot and 140 card applications
On the numbers, Souza pointed to Visa’s stablecoin settlement pilot, which has reached a $7 billion annualized run price. The mannequin lets issuers and acquirers settle worldwide obligations immediately in stablecoins, with out changing to fiat, enabling settlement seven days every week and decreasing collateral necessities.
Globally, Visa has greater than 140 stablecoin card applications reside, most operated by fintechs, with Lemon Cash cited for instance in Latin America and Puerto Rico flagged as one of many area’s greatest hubs.
Looking forward, she named the convergence of immediate funds, digital wallets, tokenized property, stablecoins and synthetic intelligence because the defining shift of the following 5 years, projecting AI agents that pay on a consumer’s behalf with stablecoins, and citing Visa’s partnership with Tempo, a blockchain constructed for agentic funds
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