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Points of Focus
- BRICS Pay combines payment gateways, multilateral netting, and decentralized financial messaging, while the official BRICS Cross-Border Payments Initiative remains a separate policy track.
- BRICS Pay could shift payment traffic away from SWIFT in selected corridors, though its public scale remains far smaller.
- BRICS Pay’s roadmap names USDT as a temporary bridge asset, leaving XRP to compete for the liquidity that remains after netting and greater payment-system interoperability.
BRICS Pay sounds like a single payment rail being assembled across the economic bloc, but under the hood, several initiatives compose the broader BRICS payments agenda.
The BRICS Pay Consortium presents itself as a decentralized partnership bringing together financial institutions, technology providers, regulators, and legal experts. Finance ministries and central banks have their own process, the BRICS Cross-Border Payments Initiative, or BCBPI. In their 2024 joint statement, BRICS finance ministers and central bank governors described BCBPI as voluntary and non-binding, encouraged local-currency settlement and called for further work through the BRICS Payments Task Force.
Reserve Bank of India Governor Sanjay Malhotra said on Aug. 11 that BRICS members were discussing links between their fast-payment systems and central bank digital currencies. The proposals remain at the discussion stage.
For now, BRICS Pay poses the clearer challenge to SWIFT as it builds alternative messaging, routing, and settlement channels across selected corridors. XRP sits further downstream: Its relevance depends on whether netting and direct payment links still leave liquidity gaps worth bridging.
BRICS Pay is building an alternative payment graph
BRICS Pay’s business-to-business (B2B) design combines payment gateways, multilateral netting, and the Decentralized Cross-Border Messaging System (DCMS). Its gateways claim support for 23 currencies, including the US dollar, Chinese yuan, Russian ruble, Indian rupee, Brazilian real, and South African rand, with stablecoins available as temporary bridge assets.
The DCMS technical documentation sets out a network where participants establish bilateral agreements, set currency-specific limits, and exchange financial messages across connected nodes. Those limits also govern liquidity transfers and provide a basis for automated clearing.
Compatibility with existing financial infrastructure is built into the design. BRICS Pay says DCMS supports SWIFT MT message formats. The official BRICS Finance Track has separately worked on uniform rules for ISO 20022 messages carried through alternative financial messaging channels.
Financial institutions can adopt common message standards without sending every message across the SWIFT network.
Where BRICS Pay can pressure SWIFT
SWIFT’s role in cross-border payments goes well beyond sending a message from one bank to another. The network coordinates institutions, standardized payment data, and thousands of possible routes across jurisdictions.
BRICS Pay’s B2B materials say payments can move through BRICS Pay gateways without correspondent accounts in Western banks. The project presents sovereign control and resilience from blocking or sanctions as explicit goals. DCMS also removes a central server and allows participants to establish their own bilateral relationships and liquidity limits.
For banks and companies operating in corridors where access to Western correspondent infrastructure is politically or commercially fragile, an additional messaging and routing network has an obvious use. BRICS Pay does not need global adoption to capture such flows. A meaningful network across a subset of BRICS+ trade corridors could shift payment instructions and settlement activity away from SWIFT.
The official BRICS process currently looks more incremental. The 2024 finance ministers’ statement encouraged stronger correspondent banking networks among BRICS countries, local-currency settlement and bilateral cooperation. It also backed further work on ISO 20022 across alternative messaging channels.
The result could be a layered system of correspondent banking, domestic payment rails, and alternative messaging channels.
SWIFT’s moat goes beyond messaging
Replicating SWIFT’s reach is a much larger challenge.
SWIFT currently connects more than 11,500 institutions and covers more than 40,000 possible payment routes. At least three institutions are connected to the network in 92% of the world’s countries and territories. The global migration of cross-border payments to ISO 20022 was completed in November 2025.
SWIFT speed has also improved sharply. Recent data shows 75% of payments reaching the beneficiary bank within 10 minutes and more than 90% within an hour. Research found that the international leg accounts for less than 20% of average end-to-end processing time. Most remaining delays occur after funds reach the beneficiary institution through domestic processing, regulation, and FX controls.
That weakens speed as a standalone case for displacement.
Furthermore, SWIFT is expanding beyond its traditional messaging role. On Aug. 19, HSBC and Standard Chartered completed the first live cross-border transaction on SWIFT’s blockchain-based ledger, following its July launch with 17 participating banks across six continents. The ledger recorded tokenized-deposit obligations on the banks’ respective systems, matched and netted them, and coordinated the transaction before final settlement through existing infrastructure.
There is a large evidence gap between the two systems. BRICS Pay’s public B2B materials describe gateways as operational, yet the B2B and consortium materials reviewed for this article do not publish aggregate payment volume or an institutional network count comparable with SWIFT’s.
Netting changes the XRP equation
XRP faces a different problem.
BRICS Pay’s B2B materials give a simplified example of multilateral netting in which 100 transactions become 10 net positions. Opposing obligations are offset before final settlement, reducing the number of positions that require funding.
Bridge assets are useful when direct currency pairs have limited liquidity or poor execution. XRP Ledger (XRPL) cross-currency payments can automatically route one asset through XRP when the XRP path is cheaper. A USD-to-MXN transaction, for example, can use USD-XRP-MXN if the bridged route offers better execution. Larger payments can combine direct and XRP-bridged liquidity.
Multilateral netting moves the liquidity calculation earlier in the process. If 100 obligations collapse into 10 residual positions, external liquidity is required for the balances that remain. The addressable market for a bridge asset becomes the liquidity left after netting.
Residual positions can still be valuable in corridors with shallow direct FX liquidity, wide spreads, or difficult settlement access. XRP’s opportunity depends on the size of those imbalances and the cost of settling them through competing routes.
BRICS Pay already names a bridge asset
BRICS Pay’s roadmap makes the competition more concrete.
For 2025-2027, its strategic plan calls for multilateral netting in national currencies, DCMS deployment across at least five countries, and temporary use of Tether’s USDt (USDT) as a bridge. The architecture can also settle through other liquid digital assets.
The 2028-2030 phase proposes phasing out USDT, running pilots with national digital currencies, connecting payment infrastructures through many-to-many gateways, and integrating central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). From 2030, the roadmap envisages interoperability between systems including UPI, Pix, CIPS, and Russia’s Faster Payments System.
USDT offers deep dollar-denominated liquidity, while XRP can connect two assets when liquidity on the XRP legs produces better execution.
Direct links between payment systems create a third route. CBDCs, tokenized deposits and connected domestic rails can settle some flows without requiring an external bridge asset. The August BRICS discussions around fast-payment systems and CBDCs put that model on the policy agenda.
The roadmap itself treats USDT as temporary, while XRP would have to compete within the same evolving liquidity environment.
Ripple’s opportunity extends beyond XRP
Ripple Payments supports settlement in RLUSD, USDC (USDC), USDT, and fiat. Ripple says its network reaches more than 60 payout markets and has processed over $100 billion in payment volume. The platform combines exchange, liquidity, and payout infrastructure within the same product.
Its June expansion with Bitso offers a useful corridor example. Bitso’s peso-backed MXNB is being integrated into XRPL and Ripple’s Payments on decentralized exchange infrastructure alongside RLUSD, creating institutional dollar-peso liquidity for the US-Mexico corridor.
XRP can enter a payment when XRPL routing finds better execution through XRP. Other assets can carry the settlement flow when they offer a better route.
A fragmented payments landscape still needs infrastructure connecting fiat, stablecoins, bank liquidity, and local payout systems across different regulatory regimes. Ripple can sell services across several of those layers.
XRP has a more specific job.
XRP has to win the routing calculation
None of the BRICS Pay, DCMS, or official BCBPI documents reviewed for this article names Ripple or XRP as part of the emerging infrastructure. BRICS Pay’s roadmap explicitly identifies USDT for its transitional bridge phase.
XRPL gives XRP a mechanism for competing for payment flow. Its auto-bridging system uses XRP when the bridged path lowers the cost of exchanging two tokens.
Liquidity depth, spreads, fees, market impact, custody, regulatory access, and on-/off-ramp costs all feed into that calculation.
Four developments would provide stronger evidence that BRICS payment fragmentation is creating structural demand for XRP:
- An explicit XRP integration by a BRICS Pay gateway, participating bank or national payment provider.
- Corridor data showing XRP routes consistently beating direct FX or stablecoin alternatives.
- Sustained institutional XRP volume attributable to cross-border settlement.
- Meaningful currency imbalances remaining after multilateral netting and requiring external bridge liquidity.
BRICS Pay has yet to publicly demonstrate anything close to SWIFT’s global reach. It can still reduce SWIFT dependence in individual corridors if banks and businesses find value in alternative messaging, local-currency settlement, and payment routes outside Western correspondent networks.
SWIFT enters the contest with scale, standardized connectivity, and an expanding tokenized-money stack. Ripple can provide payment and liquidity infrastructure across multiple assets. XRP competes for the residual liquidity that remains expensive to move. Its place in that system will depend on whether those liquidity gaps are large enough, frequent enough and costly enough to sustain demand for a bridge asset.
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