The thing that surprises everyone
Instant, free at the consumer end, universally adopted, and irreversible. Coming from a card market, the first three feel like an unambiguous upgrade and the fourth takes a while to register.
The reconciliation consequence is the part nobody warns you about. A card payment arrives inside a system that knows which order it belongs to, because the payment was initiated by that system. A Pix on a static key arrives in a bank statement, initiated by the payer from their own app, carrying a name and a value and nothing that connects it to anything you have.
What changes relative to card and bank transfer
For a business receiving money, not sending it.
| Dimension | Card acquiring | Traditional transfer | Pix |
|---|---|---|---|
| Settlement | Days, batched | Same or next day | Seconds, including weekends |
| Cost to receive | Percentage of value | Fixed fee, often material | Low or nil, varies by institution |
| Reversibility | Chargebacks for months | Effectively none | None, outside a specific fraud mechanism |
| Order reference attached | Yes, by construction | Sometimes | Only if the payment was requested |
| Who initiates | Your checkout | The payer | The payer, usually |
| Reconciliation | Automatic | Manual | Manual, on a static key |
Row four is the whole point. Card reconciliation is automatic not because card systems are sophisticated but because your system created the payment, so it already knows what the payment is for. Pix inverts that.
What to set up before you take the first payment
Five things. Doing them later is much more expensive than doing them now.
- Decide how you will be paid before handing out a keyA key given out once circulates indefinitely. The reconciliation problem this page describes is largely a consequence of a key that went out before anybody thought about it.
- Use requested payments wherever the flow allowsA payment you asked for can carry your own reference. A payment somebody sends you spontaneously cannot. Design the asking, and this problem mostly does not arise.
- Use separate keys for separate purposesOne for recurring clients, one for one-off work, one printed on anything public. Narrowing the candidate set before you look at a single field is free.
- Understand that it is irreversibleThere is a specific mechanism for fraud cases and it is not a chargeback. Treat a received payment as final, and treat a payment you send as gone.
- Start the payer-name lookup on day oneTwo columns, from the first payment. Foreign founders build this later than local ones because they do not expect to need it, and rebuilding it retroactively over a year of statements is genuinely unpleasant.
Questions
Can a foreign company receive Pix without a Brazilian entity?
Is Pix genuinely free?
What happens if someone pays me by mistake?
Does any of this apply outside Brazil?
Tell me when this exists
In the context field: whether you are receiving on a static key, and roughly how many payments a month.