ECB Governing Council opens a feasibility assessment of interlinking TIPS with Brazil's Pix

The Governing Council of the European Central Bank approved initiating an assessment of the feasibility of interlinking the Eurosystem's TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS) platform with Pix, the Brazilian fast payment system owned and operated by the Central Bank of Brazil. The ECB announced the step on 24 September 2026 and will run the assessment in close collaboration with the Central Bank of Brazil, covering technical, operational, legal and business considerations.

The ECB cites the significant economic flows between the euro area and Brazil and says an interlinking could make instant payments between the two regions faster and cheaper. Pix settles around 250 million real-time instant payments a day directly in central bank money. The ECB frames the work as part of the Eurosystem's wider effort to link TIPS with other instant payment systems and of the G20 roadmap for enhancing cross-border payments. No timeline and no decision to build were announced: this is a feasibility assessment only.

TIPS is the settlement layer under SEPA Instant, so anything that extends its reach extends the rail that the Instant Payments Regulation has just made universal across the euro area. A working TIPS-Pix link would put a central-bank-money instant option next to the card networks and the remittance operators on euro-area-to-Brazil flows, which is the first time the Eurosystem has proposed that for a corridor with this much volume behind it.

For acceptance specifically the consequence is second-order but real: merchants selling into or out of Brazil currently reach that corridor through cards or through a local PSP, and a rail that settles in seconds at central-bank cost changes what a pay-by-bank proposition can be priced at. The assessment is also a marker of how the Eurosystem intends to compete internationally with its own infrastructure rather than through the schemes.

Whether the assessment reports publicly and on what timetable, whether it reaches a build decision or stops at feasibility, and whether the ECB opens comparable assessments on other high-volume corridors now that the Pix one is formally under way.

• ecb.europa.eu