The European Central Bank (ECB) has formally begun work on whether its pan-European instant settlement platform can be joined to Brazil’s public real-time payment network.
On 24 September 2026 the ECB Governing Council authorised a feasibility assessment of an interconnection between TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS) and Pix, the system owned and run by the Central Bank of Brazil.
The two authorities will examine technical compatibility, operational processes, legal frameworks and commercial implications together.
The stated rationale is the scale of trade and financial activity already flowing between the euro area and Brazil.
Officials argue that a working link could let payments travel in seconds rather than days and at lower cost than traditional correspondent-banking routes.
Pix currently handles about 250 million instant transfers every day, all settled in central-bank money.
TIPS already settles euro, Swedish krona and Danish krone payments around the clock; further European currencies are scheduled to join.
An interoperable corridor would therefore connect two of the world’s largest public instant-payment infrastructures.
The project sits inside a wider Eurosystem programme to attach TIPS to foreign fast-payment systems.
Parallel work is under way with India’s Unified Payments Interface, Switzerland’s instant-clearing platform and the Bank for International Settlements’ multilateral Nexus network.
All of these efforts are presented as contributions to the G20 roadmap for cheaper, faster, more transparent and more accessible cross-border payments.
Brazilian authorities, for their part, describe the study as part of Pix’s “evolutionary agenda” and as one of several planned links with similar systems abroad.
They note that successful interconnections could support remittances and point-of-sale purchases, with funds credited in local currency within seconds.
Earlier reporting indicated that technical teams on both sides had already begun informal discussions.
Those talks placed Pix among the currency corridors TIPS was exploring and sketched a possible operational pilot around mid-2028, subject to separate approvals.
The official announcement of 24 September converts that exploratory work into a structured joint assessment.
No timetable for a live service has been set; both sides stress that the present phase is limited to determining whether interconnection is feasible.
If the assessment is positive, users could eventually pay at European terminals from Brazilian accounts, or send funds the other way, without relying on card networks or correspondent banks.
Foreign-exchange conversion would remain the responsibility of payment-service providers rather than the two central banks.
That architecture keeps settlement in central-bank money on each side of the corridor while pushing currency risk onto commercial intermediaries.
The initiative also illustrates a broader shift: public instant payment systems that were built for domestic use are now being examined as building blocks for international corridors. Whether TIPS and Pix can be joined will depend on answers to practical questions of messaging standards, liquidity arrangements, legal finality and oversight. Those answers will now most likely emerge from the assessment now under way.