🇨🇴 Payments in Colombia

A banked country that pays in cash

Colombia measures financial inclusion with two separate indicators: access to financial products and their actual use. The two do not grow at the same pace, and the gap between them shapes the country’s payments market. In 2024, 96.3% of adults held at least one deposit or credit product, up from 65.0% in 2011 and 92.4% in 2022 (Superintendencia Financiera de Colombia and Banca de las Oportunidades, Reporte de Inclusión Financiera 2024, published May 29, 2025). Deposit products reach 95.8% of adults, or 37.1 million people. Credit reaches 35.5% of the adult population.

Most of this growth comes from depósitos de bajo monto, simplified-KYC deposit accounts offered through digital wallets, rather than from traditional bank accounts. They reach 76.1% of adults, with an active usage rate of 64%. Both rates apply to the same adult population: 12 in 100 adults hold a depósito de bajo monto without actively using it. The pandemic accelerated the trend. The Ingreso Solidario cash transfer program covered nearly 4 million households and led to the opening of about 1 million accounts (Departamento Nacional de Planeación, 2022).

Every two years, the Banco de la República runs a perception survey that measures the instruments people actually use, not the products they hold. In fieldwork from January to April 2022, cash accounted for 78.4% of the number of everyday payments and 74.6% of their value. Electronic transfers followed at 12.6% and 15.4%, debit cards at 7.9% and 8.5%, and credit cards at 1.2% and 1.5%. The decline is real: in 2019, cash stood at 88.1%. But the starting point was very high. Results vary widely from city to city. Cash still accounts for 85.4% of payments by number in Barranquilla, against 67.5% in Bogotá.

Infrastructure statistics confirm the imbalance. In 2024, account-to-account transfers averaged 16.2 million transactions a day, instant and deferred combined, or 3.6 times the number of card transactions (Reporte de la Infraestructura Financiera, 2025). Account-to-account transfers are therefore the leading electronic instrument by volume, the position cards hold in most European and North American markets.

Bre-B: a multi-system architecture, not a single rail

Bre-B is Colombia’s interoperable instant payment system, live since October 6, 2025. The Banco de la República (BR) operates its two central components: the alias directory and the settlement mechanism. Transaction processing, by contrast, is handled by several competing private systems, so the central bank does not run the rail end to end. Bre-B is often compared with Brazil’s Pix, whose core infrastructure is run by a single operator.

The mandate comes from Article 104 of Law 2294 of 2023, the law enacting the 2022–2026 National Development Plan. It requires low-value instant payment systems to interoperate. The BR’s board of directors (Junta Directiva) exercised this power through External Resolution 6 of October 31, 2023, supplemented the same day by External Regulatory Circular DSP-465, Subject 18. The resolution sets the framework and the implementation phases, and creates the Comité de Interoperabilidad de Pagos Inmediatos (CIPI). The circular covers the technical details in seven annexes: llave management, clearing and settlement, user experience, fraud and claims handling, operating standards, messaging, and transitional measures.

SPBVIs (sistemas de pago de bajo valor inmediatos, or low-value instant payment systems) sit between participants and these two central modules. Each entity chooses one or more SPBVIs to host its llaves and process its transactions. SPBVIs keep federated directories, resolve intra-system transactions internally, and call the DICE only when a payment leaves their own network. They compete on service, use-case specialization, and price.

The technology provider for the central modules is ACI Worldwide, selected in December 2023 after a tender launched in March of that year that drew five bidders. Supervision is shared. The Superintendencia Financiera de Colombia supervises credit institutions and SEDPEs (specialized electronic deposit and payment companies), while the Superintendencia de la Economía Solidaria supervises cooperatives.

Llaves, QR codes, and merchant acceptance

A llave (literally “key”) is the alias used to receive a Bre-B payment. It is linked to an account or deposit and shared with the payer instead of full bank details. In payments between individuals and merchants, it replaces the combination of account number and bank code. There are five types, one of them reserved for merchants. A llave is needed only to receive payments; an account with no llave can still send them.

In-store acceptance relies mainly on QR codes. The Colombian market started out with proprietary QR codes, rolled out in bulk by the two dominant wallet issuers and unreadable from one app to another. The Superintendencia Financiera’s External Circular 005 of 2023 ended that regime: codes had to migrate to interoperable messaging by March 22, 2024, on the EMV QR Code Specification for Payment Systems standard. Two modes are allowed: merchant-presented and consumer-presented. Redeban’s Entrecuentas system, launched in 2023, carried the migration.

Interoperable payments were growing before Bre-B opened. Interoperable instant transfers grew 112.4% a year on average between 2023 and the first half of 2025. Interoperable QR payments reached 1.3 million transactions a day in May 2025. A Redeban pilot launched in January 2025 with 16 financial institutions used the llave model planned for Bre-B. In its first quarter, it drew about 11 million users, 23 million llaves, and 50 million transactions (Bloomberg Línea, 2025). Grupo Aval, for its part, had rolled out its Tag Aval alphanumeric identifier in Q4 2024.

Timeline and adoption

Bre-B grew out of an assessment by two international institutions. In 2021, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Financial Sector Assessment Program found that a proliferation of non-interoperable private solutions was holding back electronic payments in Colombia. It recommended an interoperable instant payment system under public governance, and warned about the counterparty risk of proprietary settlement mechanisms. The chosen architecture addresses both points: the law makes interoperability mandatory, and settlement happens in central bank money, which takes counterparty risk off the private mechanisms.

The breakdown of transactions by source account type shows which products feed the system. Of the transactions settled through January 31, 2026, half came from depósitos de bajo monto, in practice digital wallets, and the other half from savings accounts. Bre-B therefore does not run only through the traditional banking channel: low-value deposits send payments on a par with savings accounts, whereas before they worked only inside their own issuer. Giving prepaid wallets the ability to pay anyone was the public policy goal set for the project.

Nequi, Daviplata, and the low-value deposit regime

Colombia’s digital wallet market is dominated by two apps, both born inside banking groups. Nequi, launched in 2016, was incubated by Bancolombia before becoming Nequi S.A., with its own banking license. Daviplata, launched in 2011 by Banco Davivienda, was built on the low-value deposit and served as a channel for government social transfers. As a rough order of magnitude, Nequi had about 27 million users at the end of 2025, and Daviplata more than 15 million.

The growth of these two wallets sheds light on the situation Bre-B was designed to address. In 2018, the two platforms had 3.2 million users combined. By 2022, Colombia had 48 million low-value deposits, 63.7% of them with these two issuers (Banca de las Oportunidades, 2023). The country then had about 3 million digital acceptance points, mostly QR codes put up by the same issuers. Instant payments worked, but only within each brand, so users needed several wallets to pay everywhere.

Colombian law offers no single “payment license” to a foreign issuer. It must choose between a full banking license, SEDPE status (deposits and payments, never credit), or participant status under Decree 1692 of 2020. That choice determines access to the CUD, the applicable prudential regime, and the ability to hold customer balances. Only four SEDPEs were connected to Bre-B in January 2026, out of 218 participants, which shows how much weight this status actually carries in the system.

PSE and online payments

PSE (Pagos Seguros en Línea) is the bank transfer payment button of Colombian e-commerce. It has been run since 2001 by ACH Colombia S.A., the private clearinghouse set up in 1997 by the country’s banks. The flow redirects buyers to their own bank’s interface, where they authenticate and authorize a debit from their account. The merchant receives a confirmation, then the funds through clearing. Twenty-five years of use have made it a de facto standard, found on virtually every Colombian checkout page.

PSE works differently from a card payment in several operational respects. The transaction is an account debit, ordered by the account holder from their bank’s interface. There is no authorization to capture and no scheme chargeback, and settlement to the merchant follows ACH Colombia’s clearing cycle rather than real time. The failure rate depends on the availability of issuing banks, which the merchant cannot control. A buyer who drops off during the redirect means a lost cart, with no usable trace on the merchant’s side.

A small number of gateways handle the technical integration. PayU, Bancolombia-backed Wompi, ePayco, and Mercado Pago cover most merchant integrations, aggregating cards, PSE, wallets, and now Bre-B. Installment payments also exist outside cards, as Addi shows: it claims more than 35,000 physical and online points of sale and more than 3 million Colombian customers (Addi, 2026). The company targets buyers with no credit history, whom credit cards don’t reach.

PSE still dominates e-commerce, and Bre-B is now challenging it. Both rails rest on the same principle: a payer-initiated account debit. Bre-B executes it in real time, on public infrastructure, at a cost that competition among SPBVIs is pushing down. The Banco de la República has announced that the system will extend to card-not-present, recurring, and bulk payments, as well as to utility and subscription collections. These use cases overlap with what PSE handles today, so Colombian merchants face a migration schedule, one payment flow at a time.

Cards: Credibanco, Redeban, and the opening of acquiring

Card processing in Colombia was built on two domestic networks, Credibanco S.A. and Redeban Multicolor S.A. (RBM), which date back to 1970. For a long time they were owned by the country’s banks and tied to Visa and Mastercard licenses, respectively. They act as switch, acceptance network, and acquirer at the same time. Locally, the card terminal is called a datáfono. Their terminal fleets cover most of organized retail.

Decree 1692 of December 18, 2020, which amends Decree 2555 of 2010, reopened this market. It separates and defines the activities in the chain (system administration, acquiring, aggregation, and payment services) and allows nonbanks to act as acquirers. It tightens governance at system operators and requires transparent access rules. It also gives the Banco de la República the power to set interchange between participants in the systems it runs, for orders initiated with unbranded instruments.

A merger of the country’s three main payment infrastructures was considered, then dropped. In June 2023, Redeban, ACH Colombia, and Credibanco presented a plan for Redeban to absorb the other two. The combined entity would have processed more than 4 billion transactions a year at more than 3 million merchants. In 2025, the Superintendencia de Industria y Comercio flagged adverse horizontal and vertical effects on the markets for low-value payment systems and payment services. The shareholders (Grupo Aval, Bancolombia, Davivienda, BBVA) abandoned the plan.

Card volumes are still growing, though. In 2025, the systems that clear card transactions grew 21% by value and 19% by number (Banco de la República). Cards are therefore growing in absolute terms while losing ground to account-to-account transfers. In 2024, the daily number of transfers was already 3.6 times that of card transactions.

DIAN e-invoicing and the taxation of payments

Colombia uses a prior validation (clearance) model. The electronic sales invoice is sent to the DIAN, the tax authority, which checks its XML structure and assigns it a CUFE (Código Único de Facturación Electrónica) before it goes to the customer. Without this validation, the document has no tax effect. The check takes a fraction of a second and happens on every sale.

Colombia’s e-invoicing system covers several separate documents, each with its own triggering event, filing deadline, and technical annex. The sales invoice is only one of them. An integration limited to that document leaves three obligations unhandled.

Two levies apply to the cash flow itself, separately from income tax. The GMF (Gravamen a los Movimientos Financieros) taxes debits from financial accounts at four per thousand (0.4%). An exemption covers up to 350 UVT a month. The UVT is Colombia’s indexed tax value unit. It is worth COP 52,374 for 2026 (DIAN Resolution 000227 of December 15, 2025), for a monthly threshold of COP 18,330,900. Above it, only the excess is taxed.

The second levy is a 1.5% withholding tax on sales paid by debit or credit card. Its legal basis is article 1.3.2.1.8 of Single Regulatory Decree 1625 of 2016, which carries over article 17 of Decree 406 of 2001. Card issuers withhold it. A draft decree from the Ministerio de Hacienda (finance ministry) proposes shifting this obligation to acquirers and aggregators, to align the treatment of different electronic payment methods. Until that text is adopted, the withholding applies to card sales and leaves account-to-account transfers out of scope.

Operating in Colombia: what breaks and what it costs

Colombia’s payments framework was overhauled in 18 months. A payment setup designed before October 2025 departs from it in at least three ways. It ignores Bre-B, treats QR as a proprietary channel, and models acceptance costs without transaction taxes. None of the three can be fixed by changing settings: the first requires connecting to an additional payment system, the second a change of QR standard, and the third a rebuilt cost model.

• Choose your SPBVI, not just your bank. Bre-B acceptance pricing is negotiated at the system level, and it is now tiered by merchant size. Being on several SPBVIs gives an institution real negotiating leverage.
• Reserve merchant llaves early. The merchant code is assigned by the institution where the merchant holds its payment account, and alphanumeric identifiers serve as the reconciliation key for online payments.
• Build ISO 20022 in from the start. Bre-B messaging allows no proprietary variant, and the annexes to Circular DSP-465 spell out the details.
• Treat the 20-second limit as a commitment. The expected compliance rate is 99.5%: beyond that, the participant is accountable, not the rail.
• Don’t assume chargebacks. Neither Bre-B nor PSE offers them. Recourse goes through Article 51 of Law 1480 of 2011 and each participant’s fraud procedures.
• Keep a cash channel. Tiendas de barrio, taxis, and buses still run overwhelmingly on cash, and some customers have never used anything else.
• Build the DIAN into the flow, not after it. Prior validation determines whether the document has tax effect, and therefore whether the sale can be booked.

The system’s announced roadmap covers both who takes part and what it is used for. The Banco de la República has announced two more SPBVIs for 2026: Grupo Aval’s Gou Payments and Drixi, the central bank’s own public system, which will participate on the same terms as private ones. The same program plans to open Bre-B to card-not-present payments, recurring debits, bulk disbursements to multiple llaves from a single file, and utility bill collections. Each of these use cases will shift volume currently carried by cards, PSE, or cash.