The Colombia Bre-B adoption rate has now surpassed that of Brazil’s Pix at the equivalent stage, according to an analysis by EBANX drawing on data from the central banks of both countries, combined with adult population figures from the United Nations and the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. Within its first year, Bre-B reached 83% of Colombian adults, compared with 65% for Pix after the same period, an 18-percentage-point gap that the company says took Pix almost three times as long to close.
Launched in October 2025, Bre-B currently has 36 million active users, 32 million of them individuals, in a country with around 40 million adults. The system now records more than eight million transactions a day, triple the daily volume of its first month. Accumulated value moved through the network has reached nearly $80 billion since launch.
What the transaction data actually shows
Those headline figures are reinforced by independent data. According to ACI Worldwide, Bre-B processed more than 500 million transactions and registered over 100 million payment keys in its first five months. A separate working paper published by Banco de la República puts the total between 6 October 2025 and 31 January 2026 at 370.4 million transactions, corresponding to a funds flow of COP 59 trillion, with an average transaction value of COP 159,456. That same working paper records an average daily volume of 3.6 million transactions in December 2025, with the highest single-day activity on 24 December at 4.8 million transactions.
The daily figure of eight million that EBANX now cites is therefore more than double the December 2025 daily average in the central bank’s own data, which gives some independent sense of how quickly the ramp has continued into 2026. These are not projections; they are the operational numbers on record.
Why the Colombia Bre-B adoption rate moved faster than Pix
The EBANX analysis argues that architecture explains much of the difference. Colombia chose to connect existing payment systems into a single interoperable network rather than build a new rail from scratch, which is what Brazil did with Pix. Mandatory interoperability for instant transfers was applied to every institution from the outset, a lesson taken directly from the Brazilian experience. Sebastian Fantini, director of product at EBANX, puts it plainly: ‘Bre-B took inspiration from Pix and adopted from the start what had already worked in Brazil. That head start, in a country that is smaller and less banked, pushed adoption and public trust further than its neighbour managed at the same stage.’
EBANX also had a direct role in the policy process. The company says it was one of only two fintechs invited to sit on Colombia’s Interdisciplinary Committee for Interoperable Payments, which advised the authorities designing the system. That is a claim worth noting: it positions the firm as both an observer of the Bre-B story and a participant in shaping it, which is relevant context when reading its analysis.
The credit-card gap and what it means for merchants
One structural feature of the Colombian market underpins much of the commercial argument here. According to the Financial Superintendence of Colombia, only 24% of Colombian adults hold a credit card, less than a third of the 83% Bre-B penetration that EBANX calculates. Fantini’s point is direct: ‘When a merchant moves from a credit-card-only checkout to offering Bre-B, its potential customer base in Colombia more than triples.’
EBANX cites an unnamed large online retailer to support the claim. By enabling Bre-B for 5% of its customers in an initial rollout, the company reportedly saw a 5% incremental revenue uplift and $300,000 in total payment volume in three weeks. Checkout conversion is said to have moved from 20% to 50%, running 5.7 percentage points ahead of the leading local digital wallet. Among consumers who completed a transaction, the payment success rate reached 98.2%, and 45% had never previously bought from that retailer through EBANX, despite cards and other local methods having been available since 2024.
To give global merchants access to Bre-B without requiring a local Colombian entity, EBANX partnered with MOVii, described as Latin America’s first Banktech, to deliver a single-connection integration that adds a proprietary refund engine and multi-currency settlement in USD, EUR and GBP, two capabilities the system does not offer natively.
What comes next, in the regulator’s own words
The Colombia Bre-B adoption rate story is not finished. Ana María Prieto, payment system director at Banco de la República, said in an August interview with EBANX Insights that ‘the next chapter basically covers all the use cases around business payments’, including utilities, recurring payments and payroll. The final regulation covering those use cases is, according to Prieto, expected to be published by the end of the year. The central bank is also developing a common protocol for refunds, disputes and outages across the systems Bre-B connects. Until those standards are published and assessed, the full scale of the network’s commercial reach remains an open question.
