CURITIBA, Brazil, Oct. 06, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — In its first year of operation, Colombia’s Bre-B has become the fastest-adopting instant payment method in Latin America, scaling faster than Brazil’s Pix, whose success had made it a global benchmark. Launched in October 2025, the Colombian system is now used by 83% of the country’s adults, compared with 65% for Pix after its first year, an 18-percentage-point difference. Bre-B moved so fast that Pix took almost three times as long to reach 83% penetration.
The figures come from an analysis by EBANX, a global technology company specializing in payment services for emerging markets, based on data from the central banks of Brazil and Colombia — which operate Pix and Bre-B — combined with adult population figures from the United Nations (UN) and the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).
Bre-B currently has 36 million active users, 32 million of them individuals, in a country with around 40 million adults and Latin America’s third-largest digital commerce market. The system records more than 8 million transactions a day, triple the daily volume of its first month of operation. Since launch, the accumulated value moved through Bre-B has reached nearly USD 80 billion.
“Adoption moves fast when a system is built to its users’ needs, and that is exactly what happened in Colombia. Bre-B connects payment methods and digital financial solutions that used to work in isolation, solving a real problem for Colombian consumers and businesses,” explained Sebastian Fantini, Director of Product at EBANX.
To turn a set of closed systems into a single national network, Colombia took a key lesson from Pix and made interoperability for instant transfers mandatory for every institution, while taking a different route by connecting existing systems rather than building a new one from scratch. “Bre-B took inspiration from Pix and adopted from the start what had already worked in Brazil. That head start, in a country that is smaller and less banked, pushed adoption and public trust further than its neighbor managed at the same stage,” Fantini added.
EBANX took an active part in that process as one of only two fintechs invited to sit on the Interdisciplinary Committee for Interoperable Payments, which advised Colombian authorities. The company brought to the table its experience with Pix, the second most used instant payment rail in the world, and has already processed transactions for 35% of everyone who uses the system in Brazil.
How Bre-B unlocks e-commerce potential for global merchants
By making Colombia’s most popular digital payment methods interoperable, Bre-B has become an entry point for global merchants to reach cardless consumers in the country. According to the Financial Superintendence of Colombia (SFC), only 24% of Colombian adults hold a credit card, less than a third of the 83% Bre-B penetration calculated by EBANX.
“When a merchant moves from a credit-card-only checkout to offering Bre-B, its potential customer base in Colombia more than triples. All it takes is a single integration to get there. There is no marketing budget that produces that kind of reach,” said Fantini.
One of the world’s largest online retail brands has already made that move through a partnership with EBANX. By enabling Bre-B for just 5% of its customers in the initial rollout phase, the company experienced an incremental 5% revenue uplift and USD 300,000 in TPV organically in three weeks. Over the period, checkout conversion surged from 20% to 50%, running 5.7 percentage points ahead of the leading local digital wallet. Among consumers who initiated a transaction, the payment success rate reached 98.2%. Among everyone who chose to pay with Bre-B, 45% had never bought from that retailer via EBANX before, even though cards and other local methods have been available at its checkout since the relationship began in 2024.
“Instant payment systems like Bre-B drive a kind of financial inclusion that benefits local e-commerce directly, because they bring in consumers who were not buying online at all,” explained Fantini. The Colombian digital commerce market is the third largest in Latin America after Brazil and Mexico, estimated at USD 59 billion and on track to reach USD 73 billion by 2028, according to Payments and Commerce Market Intelligence (PCMI) data featured in EBANX’s Beyond Borders 2026.
To allow global merchants to tap into that opportunity by adopting Bre-B from day one, EBANX partnered with MOVii, Latin America’s first Banktech, to deliver a single-connection integration covering two capabilities the system does not offer natively: a custom proprietary reversal engine to resolve refunds, and multi-currency settlement in American dollars (USD), euros (EUR), and British pounds (GBP), eliminating local entity requirements.
What comes next for Bre-B
“The next chapter basically covers all the use cases around business payments,” said Ana María Prieto, Payment System Director at Banco de la República, in an August interview with EBANX Insights. According to Prieto, the regulatory chapter is expected to cover business payment use cases such as utilities, recurring payments, and payroll, setting the standards needed to make them fully interoperable across Bre-B, with the final regulation expected to be published by the end of the year. “We are very aware that to gain adoption and drive massive usage of Bre-B, we need to complete the other use cases and add the value-added or overlay services we have seen in other jurisdictions,” she added. The Colombian central bank is also developing a common protocol for refunds, disputes and outages across the systems Bre-B connects.
“Banco de la República’s move is strategic, because every use case added to Bre-B makes the rail stronger for everyone on it. We watched this movie in Brazil, with an extremely positive impact for global merchants that localized their payment strategy to match how consumers in the country pay. Colombia is on the same path, and it is getting there faster,” said Sebastian Fantini.
ABOUT EBANX
EBANX is the leading payments platform connecting global businesses to the world’s fastest-growing digital markets. Founded in 2012 in Brazil, EBANX was built with a mission to expand access to international digital commerce. Leveraging proprietary technology, deep market expertise, and robust infrastructure, EBANX enables global companies to offer hundreds of local payment methods across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. More than just payments, EBANX drives growth, enhances sales, and delivers seamless purchase experiences for businesses and end-users alike.
For further information, please visit:
Website: https://www.ebanx.com/en/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ebanx
Media Contact:
Leo Stamillo
leo@contentco.tech
ContentCO.tech
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/22ba63ec-7a46-43ac-b24d-b4fb85271917
