Payment Infrastructure Insights

Colombia's central bank wants shops to hold a Bre-B identifier of their own. A draft circular adds a ten-digit establishment code to the key types that can receive instant payments, obliges participants to support static and dynamic QR codes, and attaches a payment reference that would identify the good or service paid for. Responses are due by 17 October.

Brazil's Pix addressing directory crossed a billion registered keys last month, about ten million more than it held in August. Separate Banco Central do Brasil open data puts the population holding at least one key at just under 187 million individuals and businesses at month-end. Companies remain a small share of that base, at roughly one registered user in ten.

Moneycontrol, citing unnamed sources, puts the industry's proposed start date for UPI merchant charges at January 2027. NPCI had reached no decision by 8 October, and under the published framework the 0.4 percent fee on merchant UPI payments above 2,000 rupees remains scheduled to begin on 15 October 2026.

A June amendment to Mexico's SPEI rulebook turns the design of a bank's mobile transfer flow into a supervised requirement rather than a commercial choice. Banco de México set 14 December 2026 as the date by which direct and indirect participants must conform. CoDi collection messages fall under the same specifications.

A week before the 0.4 per cent merchant discount rate takes effect on UPI payments above Rs 2,000, the Reserve Bank of India says it has seen no decline in volumes. UPI averaged 802 million transactions a day in September 2026, the baseline against which the charge's effect will be measured.

Germany's national clearing house has shelved the technical specifications it published in July, after the European Payments Council postponed retirement of unstructured customer addresses. The versions dated 5 October 2025 will keep running past 15 November 2026, and the new address-field check goes with them. The procedural rules published on 23 July 2026 set out the conditions on which payment and electronic money institutions may participate in the SEPA-Clearer.

Growth at Poland's Elixir batch system came entirely from value last month, with the transaction count flat against the same month of 2025.

Mobile phone-based solutions carried over 11.1 billion of those payments, up 79 percent, while the point-of-sale network reached 337,791 terminals across 295,367 merchant locations.

Revenue from UPI's merchant discount rate is set to go into a proposed small-merchant fund that would finance merchant onboarding by acquiring banks and payment aggregators and pay incentives on UPI transactions from small merchants, particularly in rural areas and tier III centres and beyond. The 0.4 percent charge on person-to-merchant payments above Rs 2,000 starts on 15 October 2026, while the fund's operating framework is still to be settled with the Reserve Bank of India.

A delegation of around 20 trade leaders led by Confederation of All India Traders secretary general Praveen Khandelwal met Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in New Delhi on 30 September. The two associations have sought a deferment of the levy, a higher transaction threshold and the exclusion of merchant-to-merchant payments.

Liberia's two-currency mobile money switch has cleared L$4.1 billion and US$22.2 million in its first eight months, according to figures the central bank presented to central bank governors, regulators, development partners and financial institutions in Ghana. The central bank named the PAPSS launch in Liberia and the switch's deployment as the two achievements of its modernisation agenda.

Charging for cross-border instant payments through TIPS has reached the Eurosystem's top decision-making body. The ECB's register of corridors now lists four, with India's UPI alone at the realisation stage. The ECB promises further detail on its website as work advances.

Transfer counts on Brazil's instant payment system dropped in the week of 24 to 30 September 2026, a window that includes the day the federal government outlawed fixed-odds betting by provisional measure. A Brasil 247 analysis found the decline sharper than in the final weeks of September in earlier years, while the value transferred rose 5.3 percent on the previous week.

The central bank acted five days after Medida Provisória 1.394 banned fixed-odds betting in Brazil, writing the ban directly into the rules that govern its instant payment system. Only wind-down flows and refunds owed to bettors are exempt. Central bank figures already show value settled from 26 to 28 September running 15.5 percent below the same three days of the previous week.

Citi's participating bank clients can now reach three domestic instant payment rails through a single Citi account structure, without local banking relationships, bilateral agreements or country-specific technical infrastructure.

NPCI's September data release lands two weeks before a 0.4 percent merchant discount rate starts applying to person-to-merchant UPI payments above Rs 2,000 on 15 October 2026.

August's R$3.73 trillion in value was below July's R$3.80 trillion. The count comes from the central bank's broader Pix series, which includes transactions settled outside the SPI.

Counter-affidavits are due within four weeks, after the 0.4 percent charge takes effect. The petition argues that a compulsory charge cannot rest on a press release and FAQs.

Australian Payments Plus, whose PayID addressing runs on the New Payments Platform (NPP), and Bizum are among the 14 named participants. Swift also cites Pix, but Banco Central do Brasil is not on the list, and the release sets no launch date.

The operator of RTP and CHIPS picked Quant for its tokenized deposit network and expects it to be available to participating institutions in the first half of 2027. The 24 September release names no participating bank and does not identify the ledger.

The international portion of each transaction will continue to travel through established correspondent banking arrangements.

The Eurosystem's plan to reach Brazil now joins its other instant-payment interlinking projects: membership of Nexus Global Payments, a bilateral link to India's Unified Payments Interface, and a bilateral link to the Swiss Interbank Clearing Instant Payments system, all named by the ECB in the same notice.

The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System is being used for far smaller payments than a year ago, according to growth figures Afreximbank published on 11 September 2026. Volume growth far outpaced value growth, putting the mean payment at about a fifth of its year-earlier size. Afreximbank published the change as percentages rather than absolute counts and values.

Banco de México's two retail payment overlays remain marginal contributors to Mexican digital payments, with annual operation counts in the low millions. A June circular requires banks and indirect SPEI participants to standardize how mobile transfers, DiMo, CoDi and QR payments appear to customers. The compliance date is 14 December 2026.

Banco Central de Chile president Rosanna Costa said the bank will consult on a regulation to make electronic transfers easier to use at merchants.

The Banco Central do Brasil set out the Pix regulation amendments in Resolution BCB 587.

The initiative would also let Mexico's finance ministry name sectors where only digital payments are accepted. CoDi, Banxico's QR-based collection function on SPEI, recorded 4.4 million operations in 2025.

Belgian payment provider Payworld has joined the providers enabling Wero acceptance among Belgian merchants.

India's zero-MDR era for UPI merchant acceptance ends on October 15, 2026. The charge applies only to person-to-merchant payments above Rs 2,000. Merchants cannot pass the charge to customers. UPI apps are barred from levying a platform fee.

STEP2 SDD Core collections averaged 44,457,183 a day in the same month, EBA Clearing's statistics page shows.