By Hilary Schmidt
The prevailing global financial architecture has long been dominated by Western institutions and currencies, especially the US dollar. So, when the BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, along with the bloc’s new members, unveiled BRICS Pay at the Kazan Summit in 2024, it marked a significant addition to the growing global stack of de-dollarisation initiatives that are challenging that dominance like never before. What might have initially seemed like just another cross-border payment project is becoming a key representation of broader geopolitical shifts worldwide. Indeed, if successfully launched, BRICS Pay could prove a powerful conduit for major emerging economies to achieve unprecedented levels of financial sovereignty.
At its core, BRICS Pay is an effort by emerging economies to build a cross-border payment infrastructure that reduces reliance on systems such as SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), the leading financial messaging system that links more than 11,000 financial institutions worldwide and that defaults to transaction settlement in US dollars. This extensive network thus reinforces Western influence over global finance. But while it had long been regarded as a politically neutral infrastructure, SWIFT has recently become increasingly used to strategically sanction various entities, largely by restricting access to the system.
Framed as a viable alternative to SWIFT, BRICS Pay is being touted as a potentially significant threat to the West’s financial hegemony. The system involves several technologies, such as blockchain, digital platforms and mobile applications, to enable direct transactions between participating countries using their national currencies—or possibly in the future, a shared digital currency—and aims to offer a novel kind of financial architecture in which member countries can settle transactions in their own currencies.
The BRICS Pay protocol is also being developed as open source, with the platform’s decentralised nature helping to minimise transaction fees and ensure interoperability among participating nations. What’s more, it is expected to integrate members’ existing payment platforms that currently operate at national levels, including Brazil’s Pix system, China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) and UnionPay network, India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Russia’s System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS).
In so doing, they could potentially circumvent any punitive measures from the West, if applicable, and continue conducting cross-border transactions. So, if a Brazilian company can transact with an Indian supplier in both reals and rupees—and without needing to use SWIFT messaging or US dollar accounts—they become less vulnerable to the full force of future sanctions. For many of its proponents, therefore, BRICS Pay’s most important attribute is its ability to promote financial sovereignty among participating nations.
Among the most fervent of those supporters is Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. “It’s not about replacing our currencies, but we need to work so that the multipolar order we aim for is reflected in the international financial system,” Lula told the BRICS conference in Kazan, Russia, in October 2024, arguing that BRICS nations should develop alternative methods for cross-border payments to what he called “failing” Bretton Woods institutions.
Perhaps not surprisingly, given the sheer onslaught of sanctions it has faced over the last four years, Russia has also been keen to push the development of a payment system that can blunt the dollar’s hegemony. “It’s not us who refuse to use the dollar,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said during the Kazan Summit. “But if they don’t let us work, what can we do? We are forced to search for alternatives.”
Regarding BRICS Pay, members of the powerful economic bloc have since heeded the calls of Lula and Putin, expediting the development of a more multipolar global financial framework that gives emerging economies additional options beyond the dollar. And today, the technology is being developed not only as a strong geopolitical indicator of financial sovereignty but also as a highly effective tool for trade efficiency.
“BRICS Pay also experiments with digital currencies, such as the e-CNY, which would, for example, allow Ethiopia to buy things from China without first having to exchange its currency into US dollars,” according to a May 2025 research paper published by the Clingendael Institute, a Dutch think tank and academy focusing on international relations. “Should digital currencies take off—which, although government policy is moving in that direction, is still a question for the e-CNY—this could potentially help to streamline global trade. More importantly, however, BRICS Pay serves as a defence mechanism against the dominance and weaponisation of the US dollar.”
From the West’s perspective, BRICS Pay may not represent an immediate threat to the dollar’s global supremacy. That said, it is already clear that should it succeed in its aims, such an initiative will do more to wean much of the world off its dependence on the US currency than to further boost its adoption. A weaker dollar, alongside reduced reliance on SWIFT, means that the traditional leverage on which Western nations rely for international diplomacy and sanctions enforcement could become markedly weaker—a shift that may well prove irreversible should a threshold level of worldwide adoption of de-dollarisation-focused solutions such as BRICS Pay be reached.
While US President Donald Trump did not single out BRICS Pay by name, he is evidently watching developments within the group with such concerns in mind. As president-elect, Trump threatened to implement “100 percent tariffs” on BRICS should they create “a new BRICS currency, nor back any other currency to replace the mighty US Dollar”, before repeating the threat against “seemingly hostile” BRICS countries a few months later.
Relief for the West in the interim, however, might come from the fact that the development of BRICS Pay remains in its infancy, with achieving consensus across a number of key issues remaining a distinct challenge for member nations.
“The technical goals of BRICS Pay include secure, real-time processing, full regulatory compliance and mutual access without interference from external institutions,” an October 2025 report published by GIS, an independent organisation for geopolitical analysis and forecasting, explained. “However, deep disparities in financial regulation, capital mobility, anti-money laundering rules and political trust among member states continue to obstruct meaningful progress.”
BRICS Pay’s current technical implementation also remains in the early stages. Reports indicate that various elements of the infrastructure—such as integration among national systems, including China’s CIPS, India’s UPI, Brazil’s Pix and Russia’s SPFS—are still being explored and piloted. This suggests that the BRICS leaders themselves acknowledge that the project is part of a longer-term strategy to rebalance financial sovereignty, rather than a short-term disruption.
With such challenges in mind, it is clear that BRICS Pay will not displace the world’s predominant financial architecture any time soon. GIS also suggested that the eventual solution members may commonly accept would involve interoperable linking of national payment infrastructures rather than a single currency or centralised system. If so, such a compromise could still facilitate cross-border trade and financial messaging in local currencies—indeed, pilot programmes for cross-border settlements in local currencies have reportedly already occurred between Russia and China and India and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
“This approach avoids the immense political and technical difficulties of establishing a unified digital currency or clearinghouse, while still working toward BRICS’s goal of de-dollarisation,” explained Bob Savic, the head of international trade and sanctions consulting at the Global Policy Institute (GPI) and head of European Union trade and industry regulatory advisory at the Federal Trust for Education and Research, writing for GIS. “However, due to differing regulatory approaches, currency convertibility issues (notably with the Chinese yuan and Indian rupee) and competing national interests, the system will likely remain heavily reliant on bilateral agreements for several years.”
Whether BRICS Pay ultimately succeeds in achieving its ambitions remains to be seen. But at the very least, the project is raising pertinent issues surrounding financial sovereignty, the control of cross-border payment infrastructure and the future of global economic governance. As such, the technology represents one of a growing list of crucial milestones in a new era in which Western economies no longer have carte blanche to shape global systems as they see fit. Rather, emerging powers now have both the ability and the will to script their own financial futures.
International Banker
