European payments firm Volt has entered Brazil. Volt states that it has now integrated Brazil’s domestic instant payments network Pix – and established its physical presence in São Paulo.
Volt states that it currently works with over 5000 banks in Europe on the PSD2 Open Banking network. The expansion into Brazil will bring the company’s real-time payments offering to the Latam market.
Volt customers can now access Latin America’s largest market while reducing settlement times from 28 days to two seconds. For firms without a domestic presence, Volt can act as the merchant of record in-country and manages currency export, FX, and declarations to the Central Bank of Brazil.
Volt reports that since its inception in November 2020, Pix now has over 90 million active accounts, with over 500 million BRL processed in October 2021, making it the digital payment method of choice for Brazilian consumers. Now, merchants and payment service providers (PSPs) in the region can unlock a faster and more secure way to pay for their customers by integrating Volt.
André Faria, Volt founding director of LATAM, said:
“Brazil’s rapidly growing ecommerce market and traditionally underserved customer base has created a landscape ripe for payments innovation. A year since its inception, we have seen a stratospheric rise of the Pix platform with unrivalled consumer adoption. By building on this already well-established instant payments network, we are enabling both domestic and export payments for local and international businesses – whether they have an on-the-ground presence or not – at the speed of now.”
Tom Greenwood, founder and CEO at Volt, added that Pix is a shining example of the power of instant payments:
“From NPP in Australia to Singapore’s FAST network, real-time payment networks are developing at an unprecedented pace across the globe. Our decision to expand into Brazil aligns with our ambition to unite these disparate and often fragmented systems into a single and unified payments interface through which merchants can receive payments account-to-account and in real-time.”