BRICS payments: can UPI and Pix reduce reliance on SWIFT?

The BRICS summit held in New Delhi on September 12-13, 2026 gave more precise substance to a debate often compressed into the word “de-dollarisation”. Paragraph 90 of the joint declaration creates neither a common currency nor a “BRICS SWIFT”. It does, however, ask the BRICS Payment Task Force to continue work on fast, low-cost, accessible, efficient, transparent and safe cross-border mechanisms based in particular on interoperability between payment and messaging channels and settlement in local currencies.

A payment system, a card network, bank messaging and a settlement currency are four different layers. UPI or Pix can reduce dependence on cards for some transactions; alternative messaging can reduce dependence on SWIFT. But settlement, participating banks and the currencies used remain decisive.

UPI and Pix have already changed the scale of domestic payments

According to the Financial Times, instant-payment systems across BRICS economies processed more than $10 trillion over the past 18 months. UPI has more than 550 million users and Pix more than 170 million. The newspaper says Pix processed more than $6.8 trillion in 2025, while UPI handled about $3.4 trillion in India's financial year ending in March 2026.

India's growth has been particularly rapid. Public Indian data cited by the authorities show annual UPI transaction value rising from about 0.07 lakh crore rupees in 2016-17 to nearly 314 lakh crore in 2025-26. In August 2026, UPI processed about 30 trillion rupees, around $315 billion at the exchange rate used by the Financial Times.

That domestic scale should not be confused with completed internationalisation. The Financial Times notes that only a tiny share of UPI transactions currently crosses borders. BRICS members are therefore still building bridges between existing systems rather than operating a replacement for today's global architecture.

SWIFT remains a global-scale infrastructure

SWIFT says it connects more than 11,500 banks, financial institutions and major companies across more than 200 countries and territories. Its network covers more than 40,000 possible payment routes and carries value equivalent to global GDP roughly every three days. Its 2024 annual review recorded 13.4 billion FIN messages during the year, averaging 53.3 million per day. Those messages are not all payments: they also include securities, treasury and other financial traffic.

Those figures show why the debate is not about an imminent replacement of SWIFT, but about the emergence of additional routes capable of handling a growing share of trade. SWIFT itself is evolving: in July 2026 it announced that a blockchain-based ledger was ready for tokenised cross-border payment pilots with 17 banks across six continents.

Europe itself is seeking bridges to UPI and Pix

The development of these networks therefore does not fit a simple “BRICS versus the West” narrative. The European Central Bank is working on a link between TIPS, its instant-payment infrastructure, and UPI. A pilot is planned for the first half of 2027. In Brazil, Folha de S.Paulo confirmed that the Brazilian central bank and the Eurosystem are also studying a Pix-TIPS connection; legal, technical, operational and security work remains preliminary, with a possible pilot envisaged for June 2028.

For households and businesses, the initial issue is practical. A direct link between domestic systems can reduce the number of intermediaries, accelerate settlement and lower some costs. For a small exporter, faster payment reduces working-capital needs. For a migrant worker, a few percentage points less in fees directly increase the amount reaching family members. For a traveler, connected systems can enable payments directly from a bank account without relying on an international card.

Russia shows what losing access to several networks means

Russia provides the clearest example of this dependence. Visa and Mastercard suspended operations in the country in March 2022. Cards issued by Russian banks continued to work domestically through national infrastructure but stopped working on the relevant international networks abroad. Several major Russian banks were also disconnected from SWIFT under European sanctions.

SWIFT does not itself move the money: it carries standardized messages between financial institutions. Settlement then takes place through bank accounts, often using correspondent banks. Replacing SWIFT alone is therefore not enough to neutralize sanctions targeting a bank, its assets or access to dollars.

Against this background, Moscow is seeking more alternative routes. Interfax reported on September 11 that the Russian Direct Investment Fund, BRICS Pay and BRICS Pay India had agreed to develop cross-border payments and prepare pilot projects in India. The statement cited by the agency described the goal as a “technologically independent” infrastructure. That characterization comes from actors directly involved in the project and should therefore be read as an objective rather than proof of independence already achieved.

CGTN also reports that the Kremlin says about 90% of Russia's payments and transactions with BRICS countries are now conducted in national currencies. This is an official Russian claim and was not independently verified in the sources reviewed.

Moving outside SWIFT could also change visibility over flows

The centrality of financial infrastructure creates an informational advantage as well as an operational one. SWIFT says its analytics tools use payment-message data to map correspondent-banking relationships, identify unusual changes and support KYC, anti-money-laundering and sanctions controls. Its statistics are also used to measure the international use of currencies.

The United States does not, however, have free access to all SWIFT data. Under the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program agreed with the European Union, the US Treasury can obtain certain data within a defined legal framework for the prevention and investigation of terrorism and terrorist financing. SWIFT says those requests are targeted, controlled and audited.

If transactions among Russia, India, China, Brazil or Gulf economies eventually used messaging, settlement banks and currencies outside Western infrastructure, those operations would no longer generate the same data within SWIFT or Western correspondent banks. Indicators based on those networks could therefore become less representative of part of global financial activity.

This would not make official trade statistics disappear. Customs data are based on declared imports and exports, not on SWIFT. Ports, shipping manifests, bank balance sheets, foreign-exchange reserves, mirror statistics, energy consumption and satellite imagery provide other ways to estimate economic activity. What could decline is mainly the granularity and speed of some financial information available through dominant infrastructures.

Uncertain point: none of the public sources reviewed quantifies how much traffic could actually leave SWIFT or the resulting loss of information for the United States or Europe. Nor is reducing Western visibility an officially established common BRICS objective. It is a possible consequence of a more fragmented architecture, not an effect already measured.

A technical alternative would not eliminate sanctions

Parallel infrastructure could reduce the cost of exclusion from some networks. A Russian exporter paid by an Indian buyer, for example, could retain more options if the payment uses banks, messaging and currencies compatible with non-sanctioned infrastructure.

But genuine autonomy requires a complete chain: messaging, settlement, liquidity, foreign exchange, participating banks, insurers and counterparties. Secondary sanctions can also deter a foreign bank from dealing with a targeted entity if it wants to preserve access to the US market. An alternative to SWIFT can therefore reduce one point of dependence without removing the broader power of financial coercion.

The main obstacle is monetary as well as technical

BRICS currencies are not interchangeable in the same way as dollars traded in a deep and liquid global market. Some are tightly controlled, others freely traded. Trade imbalances also create stocks of currencies that can be difficult to reuse.

Russia-India trade illustrates the problem: India buys far more from Russia than Russia buys from India. If a large share is settled in rupees, Moscow can accumulate a currency it cannot easily spend on an equivalent amount of Indian goods. Those rupees must then be converted, invested or accepted by other trading partners. In such cases, the dollar can retain a useful role as a liquid intermediary currency.

Different regions frame the same shift differently

The sources reviewed agree that interconnection work is under way, but they differ on its primary purpose. The New Delhi declaration emphasizes efficiency, cost and payment security. The Indian Express highlights India's pragmatism and lack of support for a common currency. The Financial Times focuses more on convertibility constraints and trade imbalances, while Folha de S.Paulo shows that Pix is also seeking links with Europe.

CGTN frames interoperability as a tool for financial diversification; Interfax highlights Russia's interest in BRICS Pay under sanctions; Al Jazeera also connects the discussions to sanctions on Russia and Iran while stressing that BRICS does not necessarily seek to replace the dollar outright.

Two editorial interests deserve explicit mention. CGTN is Chinese state media, and its framing operates within Beijing's official discourse on a more multipolar financial order. The RDIF cited by Interfax is directly involved in BRICS Pay, so its claims about technological independence describe promoter objectives. Other sources emphasize different aspects according to their editorial focus, including the dollar, sanctions, convertibility and efficiency gains. Comparing regional sources helps distinguish shared facts from interpretation.

Rebalancing rather than replacement

In the short term, the most tangible effect of these bridges would probably be less dramatic than the geopolitics: faster payments, potentially lower fees and more options for small businesses, travelers and diasporas. Over the medium term, governments and companies could gain additional channels when an international network is disrupted or politically restricted.

Over the longer term, if a meaningful share of trade could be settled through infrastructure less dependent on dominant Western networks, financial power would be distributed across more systems. Some sanctions leverage could become less absolute and part of the informational advantage associated with dominant infrastructure could decline.

The New Delhi summit therefore does not mark the birth of a new global financial system. It formalizes another step: turning already powerful national payment systems into networks able to communicate with one another. The scale of the shift will now depend on pilots, liquidity between currencies and actual adoption by banks and companies.

FAQ

Have BRICS created an operational alternative to SWIFT?

No. The New Delhi declaration confirms work on payment and messaging interoperability, but no single network currently replaces SWIFT across the group.

Would an alternative to SWIFT bypass US sanctions?

It could reduce one technical dependency, but it would not remove all sanctions. Banks, currencies, assets, insurers and counterparties can be targeted separately, while secondary sanctions remain an important lever.

Would the United States lose all visibility over those exchanges?

No. Some flows fully outside SWIFT and Western banks would be less visible through those channels, but customs, shipping, banking and trade statistics would remain available. The scale of any loss of visibility cannot currently be quantified.