PIX and Stablecoins Are Not Rivals, Says Visa’s Digital Currencies Chief for Latin America

Stablecoins did not arrive to fight PIX. That was the message from Antônia Souza, Visa’s Director of Digital Currencies for Latin America and the Caribbean, on Latam Desk, the BeInCrypto podcast hosted by Luis Magalhães, the company’s regional lead. “We are stable coins are not here to fight against PIX”, she said, pushing back on a framing that has become common across the region.

In her view, the two serve different jobs. PIX is built for real-time everyday payments, while stablecoins are meant for cross-border flows, such as sending money abroad or storing dollars more easily. She noted that Visa has been developing the Visa Connector, a payment initiator that helps initiate PIX transactions, precisely because the company sees the instant-payment rail and the stablecoin rail as complementary rather than competing.

The exception, Souza said, is countries without a massive instant-payment system. In Colombia, a peso-backed stablecoin is helping people make instant payments because they lack a solution on the scale of Brazil’s PIX. Elsewhere, she stressed, most stablecoin activity runs on USD stablecoins and is focused on cross-border transactions, not daily routine spending.

Not everything should be a stablecoin

Souza was firm that the technology should not be forced into every use case.

“I am totally against that type of approach”, she said, criticizing market attempts to apply stablecoins to everything.

Her point of view, which she said she pushes with Visa’s own clients, is to concentrate on the problems only stablecoins can solve, arguing that focus alone opens a large enough market to work with.

She underlined a data point that captures Brazil’s moment: the country now has more crypto investors than its B3 stock exchange. Adoption in the region, she said, is driven by both regulation and actual usage, with Brazil, Mexico and Argentina among the largest markets even against the global average.

The landscape remains uneven, she added, with some countries still barring financial institutions from working with crypto while Brazil advances its framework.

Visa as the bridge for banks

Much of the interview centered on Visa’s role connecting traditional institutions to the technology. Souza said she has been talking with major banks from Brazil to the Caribbean, and that interest is real, but so are the doubts, about integrating with legacy systems, protecting against fraud and scams, and controlling the source of funds. Because Visa has engaged with crypto for more than ten years, the strategy is to integrate stablecoins into its networks and offer banks a path that is “already scalable, that’s already trustable by the market, by the ecosystem”.

She also agreed with Visa CPO Jack Forestell that stablecoins are gaining meaningful traction while still not being plug-and-play for payments.

“It needs interoperability, security, compliance, infrastructure capabilities. And this is not something that is quite ready yet”, she said.

A $7 billion pilot and 140 card programs

On the numbers, Souza pointed to Visa’s stablecoin settlement pilot, which has reached a $7 billion annualized run rate. The model lets issuers and acquirers settle international obligations directly in stablecoins, without converting to fiat, enabling settlement seven days a week and reducing collateral requirements.

Globally, Visa has more than 140 stablecoin card programs live, most operated by fintechs, with Lemon Cash cited as an example in Latin America and Puerto Rico flagged as one of the region’s biggest hubs.

Looking ahead, she named the convergence of instant payments, digital wallets, tokenized assets, stablecoins and artificial intelligence as the defining shift of the next five years, projecting AI agents that pay on a user’s behalf with stablecoins, and citing Visa’s partnership with Tempo, a blockchain built for agentic payments

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