Brazil and ECB Launch Feasibility Study to Link Pix and TIPS

Overview

• The Banco Central do Brasil and the European Central Bank formally began a joint feasibility study on Thursday, Sept. 24, 2026, to assess whether Brazil’s Pix can be connected to the Eurosystem’s TIPS settlement service.
• Teams will examine technical, operational, legal and business‑model issues required for a public‑infrastructure link rather than a private rails connection.
• If approved and successfully tested, the link could let senders and merchants move money across Brazil and the euro area with funds made available in the recipient’s local currency in seconds, lowering costs and improving transparency for remittances and purchases.
• The ECB has published a provisional timetable that projects an exploration phase in late 2026 and possible implementation steps through mid‑2028 but stresses those dates are preliminary and depend on further approvals and pilots.
• The project sits inside a wider G20 push to improve cross‑border payments and joins parallel Eurosystem work to connect TIPS to Nexus, India’s UPI and Switzerland’s instant‑payments system, with practical challenges including cross‑currency settlement, liquidity management, AML/CFT rules and governance.