Designing PIX for Brazil's biggest public bank

PIX is Brazil's instant payment system, created by the Central Bank and launched in November 2020: free transfers that settle in seconds, 24/7, using a simple key instead of bank details. Banco do Brasil serves tens of millions of customers, from digital natives to people opening their first account. Getting PIX right here meant getting it right for a huge slice of the country, on a launch date set by the regulator, in a market full of digital fraud.

I led the PIX design workstream inside BB's app and internet banking. That meant interviewing the Central Bank's own staff to turn regulation into design decisions, benchmarking WeChat Pay, Alipay and UPI, running a war-room design sprint with engineering and business, rebuilding the information architecture when the rules changed mid-project, and testing with five users across very different levels of digital literacy. The onboarding for PIX keys, the part everyone struggled with, was redesigned from those sessions.