The architecture of the decentralized cross-border payments system, BRICS Pay, designed to connect national settlement systems such as India's UPI, China's CIPS, and Russia's SPFS, is targeted for operational launch during the leaders' meeting in September.
With just over two months remaining until the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi, the bloc's most closely watched financial initiative is undergoing its final stage of testing. If BRICS Pay functions as stated, it will represent the most tangible step toward the long-discussed goal of providing BRICS+ economies with a means to conduct trade without relying on payment channels controlled by the West.
For many years, the concept of 'de-dollarization' remained more of a rhetorical device than a clear action plan. In Rio de Janeiro in 2025, following Brazil's presidency, the Declaration noted that de-dollarization was not named as an official goal of the bloc; instead, the emphasis was placed on the more modest phrasing of 'expanding trade in local currencies.' This caution reflected real internal disagreements within the group, as Brazil and India historically showed greater restraint than Russia or China regarding steps that could be perceived as openly confrontational towards the US dollar.
India's chairmanship in 2026 adopted a more technical rather than rhetorical approach to this fundamental issue. Instead of promoting a single BRICS currency—an idea that periodically raised concerns in Washington but never gained real support among the bloc's finance ministries—New Delhi focused efforts on ensuring system interoperability. The question is not 'what will replace the dollar,' but 'can a merchant in São Paulo pay a supplier in Shanghai without involving correspondent banks in New York or London?'
Unlike a centralized payment network, BRICS Pay is designed as a linking layer between existing domestic systems, not as a replacement for them. The Reserve Bank of India included the interoperability of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) in the agenda for the New Delhi summit. The discussed mechanisms will allow a payment initiated in one member country's national system to be recognized and settled in another's system, with the cross-border phase being processed via a base CBDC or an existing digital currency network. Essentially, this bypasses bottlenecks associated with correspondent banks, which slow down and increase the cost of cross-border settlements between developing economies, especially for small exporters who lack sufficient volume to cover multiple currency conversion fees.
The appeal for BRICS+ economies is evident: intra-bloc trade is growing steadily. Only India and Russia reported reaching a record bilateral trade of $68.7 billion in the last reporting period, and trade between China and Russia has exceeded $200 billion annually for three consecutive years. As this volume grows, so do the costs, both financial and geopolitical, associated with routing an increasing share of these transactions through intermediaries denominated in dollars and subject to US sanctions regimes and compliance requirements whose formation is outside the influence of the member countries.
Financial engineers studying similar interoperability projects elsewhere warn that technology is rarely the limiting factor. More complex issues are institutional: which central bank bears ultimate responsibility for settlements in case of a dispute, how is currency risk assessed and absorbed when a payment crosses two or three national systems within a single transaction, and how are anti-money laundering standards harmonized across jurisdictions with very different regulatory philosophies. China's CIPS, India's UPI, and Russia's SPFS were created for different purposes and within different legal systems; integrating them without creating new points of failure or new avenues for regulatory arbitrage is a truly complex engineering and diplomatic task, not merely a technical one.
There is also the issue of membership. Following the recent accession of Indonesia and, pending official confirmation, Saudi Arabia, BRICS now has eleven full members, and the circle of partners continues to expand. Each new member represents another domestic payment system that must eventually be integrated, another central bank with its own risk tolerance, and another set of capital control rules that BRICS Pay must adhere to, not abolish. Ongoing negotiations by Zimbabwe for entry into the New Development Bank and the parallel process of Uzbekistan's accession serve as a reminder that the bloc's institutional structure is being built against a backdrop of constant expansion, complicating any unified implementation timeline.
Three aspects will indicate whether the September summit leads to a genuine breakthrough or merely another declaration of intent. First, attention should be paid to whether the summit communiqué includes concrete operational commitments, defined currency pairs, specific pilot corridors, and target volumes, rather than general statements about 'studying' interoperability. Second, whether the New Development Bank, recently assigned a stable AAA credit rating by China Chengxin International, plays a visible role in mitigating early settlement risks would signal institutional support beyond political statements. Third, whether any G7 governmental structure responds publicly, as a restrained reaction might suggest that BRICS Pay is viewed in Western capitals merely as a tool for facilitating trade, rather than a serious challenge to dollar dominance.
At present, a fair assessment is that BRICS Pay represents real progress in solving a genuinely complex problem built upon deepening trade relations. Whether it becomes the operational core of a new era of payments or just an ambitious pilot project quietly scaling down will only become clear when transactions flow through it, not declarations.
