Colombia’s instant payments reached 83% of adults in just one year

Colombia’s Bre-B instant payment system marked its first anniversary with 83% of the country’s adults on board — faster first-year adoption than Brazil’s Pix, the global benchmark, which reached 65% in its first year. Bre-B now counts 36 million active users making more than 8 million transactions a day, moving nearly $80 billion since launch, according to an EBANX analysis of central-bank data. The trick: instead of building a new system from scratch, Colombia wired its existing ones together — and made interoperability mandatory.