Colombia’s real-time payment system Bre-B is rewriting the regional playbook and the numbers are hard to ignore.
Six months is a short window in the lifespan of a national financial infrastructure. For Bre-B, Colombia’s central bank-backed instant payment system, it has been enough time to process over 600 million transactions and register more than 34 million users — a result that is drawing comparisons to some of the most successful payment launches in modern history.
According to data from Banco de la República as of April 5, 2026, the system has processed 638.69 million transactions at an average value of 157,193 pesos (approximately US$43) each. The platform has also registered 103.38 million payment keys since its official launch on October 6, 2025.
A Milestone With Real-World Weight
The significance of this benchmark extends beyond raw figures. Cash still dominates approximately 77.8% of transactions in Colombia, according to Banco de la República. Against that backdrop, Bre-B’s rapid uptake signals a genuine behavioral shift — not merely a migration of already-digital users, but a demonstrable expansion of the formal financial system’s reach.
Traditional interbank transfers in Colombia can carry fees approaching COP 8,000 per transaction, a meaningful deterrent for smaller or lower-income payments. Bre-B eliminates this friction entirely: the central bank will waive charges for at least the first three years, a policy designed to lower barriers for consumers and merchants alike.
How Bre-B’s Growth Compares
Context matters when evaluating any launch-phase payment system. Brazil’s Pix, perhaps the most relevant benchmark, set an extraordinarily high bar. Within six months of its November 2020 launch, 190 million Brazilians were using Pix, and within two years, it surpassed credit cards, debit cards, and checks combined. Pix achieved a compound annual growth rate of 202% over its first five years — a figure that remains unmatched globally.
India’s UPI presents a different trajectory. UPI’s growth was initially slow, reaching only 10 million monthly transactions in 2017, and it took approximately three years to reach 1 billion monthly transactions. Growth accelerated later, fueled by demonetization and COVID-19, and by August 2025, UPI was processing 20 billion transactions monthly.
Costa Rica’s SINPE Móvil, launched in 2015, offers a closer regional comparison — a smaller-scale success story built on phone-number-based transfers that normalized digital payments among everyday users, but without the interoperability mandate or central-bank infrastructure backing that Bre-B benefits from.
Bre-B is already being described as one of the most rapidly scaled real-time payment systems in Latin America, and ACI Worldwide (the technology partner behind the platform) received Central Banking’s 2026 Financial Market Infrastructure Services Award in recognition of the implementation.
The Road Ahead
Bre-B’s architecture was deliberately modeled on lessons drawn from Pix and UPI. EBANX, one of only two fintechs invited to sit on Colombia’s Interdisciplinary Committee for Interoperable Payments, helped inform features, including QR code payments, key-based identification, and mandatory interoperability.
QR code payments between individuals are expected in the first half of 2026, with broader merchant functionality and public-private alliances planned through 2028. Colombia’s central bank notes that Bre-B’s registered users now represent roughly three-quarters of the country’s adult population — a penetration rate that, if sustained, would place it among the fastest financial inclusion stories in the region.
Surpassing 600 million transactions in six months does not make Bre-B Pix. But it does make Colombia a market that the payments world can no longer afford to overlook.
