As a Brazilian that moved to Canada, and used both systems. Pix is way more advanced than Interac. The UX is better, the adoption is way higher. I have paid cab drivers in Brazil with Pix, since transfers are instant. It is used by MANY as a substitute for cash. With Interact, there is a time delay sometimes, which makes it not work that well for live payments like this.
There are also more use cases covered. Instead of you having to type all the info of you are paying, they can print out a code for you, with the value/their info. So you can just copy/paste/read qr code. This allows business to use Pix to handle internet payments very easy, during checkout, they just generate a Pix code, that you pay and it confirms your payment in a couple of seconds.
It is also something that the Central Bank of Brazil setup, so there is no profit motif except for fees charged only to business that use it, to cover operating costs. Every single bank that I'm aware of in Brazil quickly implemented it.
Company I work for (Clicksign, a Brazilian e-signature company) also uses PIX for signatory verification. We just make a 10 cent charge on a signatory and when he/she pays we get a callback and now we have valid and up to date information that confirms they are who they say they are.
Basically a better e-mail token verification: you know the person actually has access to their bank account and is not an impersonator.
We were actually the first to do that, but the advantages of an instant payment system are endless. This same thing could be done for many other use cases.
A credit card generally is meant to give a person credit. In third world countries, lots of people are poor, and do not have access to credit. The credit cards that they do have access to charge absurdly high interest rate, and most working class people should probably stay away from them.
There’s that and also credit cards are usually paid, a monthly or yearly, so not everyone has them. Pix is free so penetration is much higher.
The degree of fraud with credit cards is huge in Brazil, so for us it wouldn’t bring about trust in a legal setting: someone could’ve just cloned your card and signed a document in your stead, without you ever knowing. Pix has the added benefit that the person needs to physically hold the phone, input the bank passcode and/or biometrics, in order to pay it.
Well, I'm not sure about Interac Email Transfers as I have not used it. But I have not seen something change up finances here in Brazil as fast like Pix during my life - it's extremely flexible and efficient.
The rollout was structured in a way that pretty much every single bank in the country started taking up Pix payments with no friction, so you can send money to almost everywhere. Aside from that, you can setup emails, mobile phones, random hashes, and Brazilian ID numbers as Pix keys to transfer to and fro.
And yeah well, the mobile-friendly UI is a thing because most bank apps here have abysmal desktop UIs and I would go as far as saying they have (pretty much) given up on developing those to focus on the mobile user base instead.
Jumping on the bandwagon here when it comes to having extensively used both, I second the "Interac/Fax - Pix/Internet" analogy.
I won't get into the actual implementation details of both solutions, but the way Pix changed the finance landscape of Brazil is something else.
The major difference for me personally is the fact that Pix transfers are instant as in instant messaging instead of Interac's (more often than I'd like) 30min transfers.
Also, paying anything via Interac is kind of awkward compared to Pix's UX flows implemented by Brazilian banks. Can't quite explain it but it's there. Pix is one of the things I miss most from Brazil, and I'm glad Canada's Interac is as prevalent as it is otherwise it'd be a huge step down.
On the UX aspect, Brazil’s central bank has a heavy hand over the PIX experience, going as far as publishing the UX Guidelines[1] as Banking Regulation.
