The European Central Bank's Governing Council has approved initiating a feasibility assessment for linking TIPS, the Eurosystem's TARGET Instant Payment Settlement platform, to Pix, Brazil's fast payment system. The ECB said on September 24, 2026 that it will run the work in close collaboration with the Central Bank of Brazil, which owns and operates Pix, covering technical, operational, legal and business considerations.
Two rails that already settle in central bank money
TIPS settles in central bank money, and so does Pix. The ECB puts the Brazilian system at approximately 250 million real-time instant payments daily, settled directly in central bank money. A link between them would not need a commercial bank in the middle to hold the other side's float, which is the part of cross-border payment that adds cost and delay.
The ECB grounds the work in the significant economic flows between the euro area and Brazil, and says interlinking the two systems could facilitate faster and lower-cost instant payments between the two regions.
Three other TIPS interlinking projects
The assessment sits inside a portfolio of initiatives the Eurosystem says it is exploring to link TIPS to other fast payment systems. They include joining Nexus Global Payments, the multilateral network of instant payment systems initially launched by the Bank for International Settlements. They also include a bilateral link with the Unified Payments Interface, developed by the National Payments Corporation of India and regulated by the Reserve Bank of India. A third is a bilateral link with the Swiss Interbank Clearing Instant Payments system, developed by the Swiss National Bank. The ECB frames all of it as its contribution to the G20 roadmap for a faster, cheaper, more transparent and more accessible global payments ecosystem.
For a payment provider, the multilateral and bilateral routes are not interchangeable. Nexus standardizes one connection to reach many countries. A bilateral link is negotiated end to end, which usually means faster agreement on messages and slower agreement on rules.
The questions the assessment has to settle
No infrastructure is being built at this stage. A feasibility assessment establishes whether a link can work and on what terms. The difficulties in projects of this kind are as much legal and operational as technical. They cover which entity guarantees the foreign exchange leg, and how sanctions screening applies to a payment that crosses both jurisdictions in seconds. They also cover how a Brazilian payer and a euro area payee each learn what the payment will cost before sending it.
How a link would reshape the cross-border chain
Today a euro area business paying a Brazilian supplier goes through correspondent banking, with a chain of two or three institutions, a value date and a spread it discovers after the fact. A direct link between the two instant systems would compress the chain, but it would not remove the currency conversion: someone still has to price euros against reais, and that party will charge for it.
What matters most to providers is therefore where the foreign exchange sits. If it is left to the banks at each end, a link mostly saves time. If the assessment defines how the conversion is quoted and guaranteed, it changes the economics of a whole corridor, and the providers whose margin comes from that spread would be affected.
The ECB published no timetable for the assessment or for any link that might follow it.