Instant Payment Interoperability in LATAM: QR and Beyond

WAU Marketing
a few seconds ago
5 min read

The real payments milestone in LATAM wasn't inventing an instant system in each country. It was realizing that owning yours, in isolation, is no longer enough: the next leap is getting them all to connect to each other.

For years, the regional conversation was a race: who launches their instant payment system first, who moves more transactions, who has the best app. And the region won that race handily. But the 2026–2027 horizon changes the question. It's no longer about having your own instant rail; it's about that rail talking to the others—across banks, across fintechs, across different QR codes, and eventually across countries. Interoperability stopped being a nice-to-have and became the field where everything is now played. And for whoever designs the infrastructure, that's a massive technical demand almost no one names.

LATAM no longer competes on speed: it competes on connection

It's worth sizing up what the region built. In Brazil, PIX is used by about 170 million adults and more than 20 million businesses, and just through October 2025 it had moved around R$28 trillion, according to Agência Brasil citing Central Bank data. In Mexico, SPEI turned 21 and processed more than 5.418 billion operations in 2024, placing the country among the ten with the highest real-time payment volume in the world, above economies like the UK and Canada, per Banxico figures reported by Emprefinanzas.

The point isn't to show off numbers. It's that with that installed base, the room to improve no longer lies in the speed of an isolated system—that's solved—but in removing the borders still standing between systems, between QR brands, and between institutions.

Bre-B: betting on interoperability as the starting point, not an add-on

The clearest case of this mindset shift is Colombia. Bre-B, which began operating on October 6, 2025, wasn't designed as "another payment system," but explicitly as "Colombia's new interoperable immediate payments system," letting you transfer regardless of which institution holds your account or deposit, according to Banco de la República. Interoperability isn't a later module: it's the design. By May 2026 the system had accumulated 105 million registered keys, the same Banco de la República reports.

And here's the honest caveat, because interoperability is not trivial: Banco de la República postponed Bre-B's launch more than once. The reason wasn't marketing; it was exhaustive testing "on the various layers of the nodes and the technological infrastructure involved," as Infobae reported. Connecting many systems so they behave as one is hard. That difficulty is exactly what each institution's core ends up paying for—or charging for.

Interoperable QR: the acid test Argentina already passed

If you want to see where the region is headed, look at QR. For years, each wallet had its own code, and merchants ended up with a counter full of stickers that didn't speak to one another. That's ending. In Argentina, during September 2025, 98.2% of instant transfers were initiated via interoperable QR, with 71.6 million payments and 54.3% year-over-year growth, according to the BCRA's Monthly Retail Payments Report.

That 98.2% is the signal of the future: a single QR any app can read and pay. For merchants it means one code instead of ten. For users, it doesn't matter which app they carry. For the financial institution, it means its core has to understand and respond to a common standard—not its own dialect—in real time.

Beyond borders: the cross-border interconnection coming next

The next chapter, the truly ambitious one, is connecting instant systems across different countries. Today cross-border payments remain slow and expensive: globally, only 35% of cross-border retail payments are credited within the first hour, against a 75% target, and sending US$1,000 through a person-to-person corridor costs about 2.6% on average, according to the FSB's 2025 progress report on the G20 Roadmap. Compared with a PIX or a SPEI that settles in seconds at near-zero cost within each country, the contrast is brutal.

The answer being built is to standardize how systems connect, instead of laying a custom cable between each pair of countries. The BIS Project Nexus does exactly that: a single connection to the platform to reach all other systems on the network, with payments completing in 60 seconds in most cases. Its five founding central banks agreed to create a managing entity, the Nexus Scheme Organisation, in Singapore, according to the BIS. Although the first deployment is in Asia, the model is replicable—and it's the direction PIX's internationalization pilots and the regional-integration initiatives driven by multilateral bodies are also pointing toward.

What all of this demands of your core

Here's the uncomfortable part for many institutions. Interoperability isn't an agreement you sign; it's a technical capability your core system either has or doesn't. To connect to an interoperable rail—a common QR, a Bre-B, an eventual cross-border corridor—your core needs three things a legacy batch system simply doesn't deliver: respond in real time (24/7, weekends and holidays included), expose and consume data via API under an external standard you don't control, and do it with traceability and governance for compliance and fraud prevention.

An old core can, with effort, launch "its own" walled-off instant payment. What it can't do is truly interoperate: speak the common language, in real time, with anyone, anytime. And as already happened with Bre-B, that difference shows up in the testing, not in the brochure.

How we see it at WAU

At WAU we design cores built to interoperate, not to wall themselves off. That means a real-time-native, API-first architecture, able to adopt external standards—EMVCo for QR, interoperable instant-payment schemes, whatever protocols each corridor demands—without rewriting everything each time. Because the future of payments in the region doesn't reward whoever has the fastest system locked in their own garden; it rewards whoever can connect with everyone else. Interoperability isn't bolted onto a legacy core: either the core was born to connect, or it stays off the network.

If you want to know how ready your core is for the interoperable world that's already here—common QR, systems that talk to each other, cross-border on the way—let's talk. 👉 Book a conversation with our team.