Pay abroad with the card you already have
BRICS Pay is a free app for paying in shops, cafes and hotels across BRICS+ countries (Russia, Brazil, India, China, South Africa and new members). Link your existing bank card, scan a QR code at the checkout — and the payment goes through with no currency exchange and no need to open local accounts.
Why BRICS Pay exists
Imagine landing in Shanghai. You pull out your Visa card — and it’s declined. China historically runs its own card network UnionPay, plus mobile wallets Alipay and WeChat Pay, which require a Chinese account. You walk to a currency exchange with US dollars and lose money on the rate and fees. Opening a local bank account during a one-week trip is unrealistic.
The same is true the other way around: a Chinese tourist in Moscow can’t use WeChat Pay. A Russian visitor in Dubai pays from their card with a triple conversion: rouble → dollar → dirham. A Brazilian in Delhi can’t use a card at all — each side has its own set of national payment systems that don’t talk to each other.
This is a technical problem, not a political one: over the decades each country built its own internal infrastructure optimised for the local market. The “universal” global networks (Visa, Mastercard, SWIFT) sit on top — they work, but charge their fees and answer to Western regulators.
BRICS Pay takes a different route: instead of yet another “overlay”, it connects the existing national systems directly. Russia’s SBP can talk to India’s UPI, Brazil’s Pix or China’s UnionPay through a single protocol. For you as a user this means: one app works in every BRICS+ country, with the card you already use, no new accounts and no exchange offices.
BRICS is an alliance of five major emerging economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Since 2024 it has expanded to include the UAE, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. The “+” covers partner countries that join initiatives without full membership: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand and others. Combined: more than a third of world GDP and almost half of the planet’s population.
The four freedoms of BRICS Pay
The slogan of the project, and it is not just marketing — each freedom corresponds to a concrete technical capability. A closer look:
Freedom of movement
Travel without worrying about how to pay. Your familiar card works in BRICS+ as it does at home — no “banking quest” of opening accounts, exchanging currency or hunting working ATMs.
Freedom of choice
Use the payment methods you already trust. Visa, Mastercard, Russian Mir, Indian RuPay, Chinese UnionPay — all of them work with BRICS Pay. No need to issue a new card just for one trip.
Freedom from monopolies
Today most international payments go through one network — SWIFT. Convenient until it’s not: in 2022 a number of Russian banks were cut off in hours by a political decision. BRICS Pay is built so that disconnecting a participant is impossible — servers run in every country.
Freedom to develop
When you pay in dollars abroad, part of the markup leaves the local economy and ends up with American and European intermediaries. BRICS Pay settles directly: rouble ↔ yuan with no detour through USD. At trade-flow scale, that is billions of dollars a year staying within the participating economies.
How it works under the hood
BRICS Pay is not a single app but an entire ecosystem. At a high level it has three layers: a messaging network, a settlement bridge and end-user apps. Briefly about each:
Connects every local system
Inside BRICS Pay you find Russia’s SBP (Bank of Russia’s Faster Payment System), India’s UPI (Unified Payments Interface — the national instant-payment network with 500M+ users), Brazil’s Pix, China’s WeChat Pay, plus national cards Mir, RuPay, UnionPay, ELO. The technology has “handshakes” with each of them at the protocol level.
No single point of control
Financial messages flow through a distributed network — DCMS — with servers in each participating country. If one node goes offline (technically or politically), the others keep working. This is the same idea as “fault-tolerant architecture” used in critical aviation and energy infrastructure.
Native-currency settlement
Yuan → real, rouble → rupee, dirham → rand — directly, without going through dollars. This eliminates the “double conversion” that eats 8–15% in classical international transfers. By expert estimates this can save BRICS countries about USD 15B a year on trade settlement alone.
Compliance with the law
Every transaction goes through identity verification (KYC — “Know Your Customer”, the same procedure as opening a bank account) and anti-money-laundering checks (AML). Conformance with the international FATF standard and the OFAC sanctions list. You cannot move “dirty” money through the system — everything is checked automatically.
Community governance
Decisions are taken jointly by all participating countries and partner companies — banks, fintech startups, regulators, technology providers. No single country has a veto. This model is called DAO — “Decentralised Autonomous Organisation”: rules are set in advance and changes need a majority.
Scales gracefully
The technology is designed to onboard new countries and banks fast. It matters: if five more partners join tomorrow, the infrastructure does not crack. Architects call this “fractal” — every new piece plugs in by the same rules as the existing ones, no rebuild required.
Three apps, three jobs
BRICS Pay ships as three separate apps. Names are similar but purpose is different. To avoid mixing them up, here is a quick guide.
BRICS Pay — for shopping
If you are a tourist, a business traveller, or simply pay at merchants. Link an ordinary Visa or Mastercard, scan a QR at the till — done. In English this is called C2B payments (Consumer to Business). Free in Google Play and App Store, developer NB PAY FZCO (Dubai).
BRICS Pay Wallet — for crypto
If you work with Bitcoin, Ether, USDT and other cryptocurrencies. Holds 600+ digital coins, on-app exchange, plus staking — like a bank deposit but in crypto — with up to 20% APY. The keys stay only with you, no company can freeze them.
BRICS Pay B2B — for business
If your company trades with BRICS+ countries (import, export, services). Inter-company payments (B2B — Business to Business) from USD 2,000, in 23 currencies, settled in minutes instead of the usual 1–5 SWIFT days. A dedicated manager on every deal.
When does it go fully live?
BRICS Pay didn’t appear yesterday and won’t arrive tomorrow “all at once”. It rolls out in stages — each date marks an integration with another national payment system.
Payment infrastructure of this scale is not built in a year: just harmonising regulatory rules across different central banks takes months. For comparison: SWIFT was built over half a century, and India’s UPI, launched in 2016, only reached a serious share of payments around 2022.
That is why BRICS Pay’s roadmap lists realistic integration milestones rather than marketing promises — published on the official site brics-pay.com.
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Now
Pilot in Russia
Foreign tourists pay in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sochi, Kazan. Apps already published in Google Play and App Store.
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2026 Q1
National QR standards
Wider C2B launch supporting SBP and MultiQR. Foreign tourists get full access to QR payments in Russia.
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2026 Q2
Türkiye, UAE, Egypt, CIS
Integration with the local payment infrastructure of four major travel destinations for Russian tourists.
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2026 Q4
All BRICS+
Onboarding of India (UPI), Brazil (Pix), China (UnionPay), South Africa (PayShap), Indonesia and Saudi Arabia.
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2027 Q3
CBDCs
Connection of central-bank digital currencies: digital rouble, e-CNY, e-INR, DREX (Brazil).
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2030
Full operational phase
By that point BRICS Pay is forecast to handle 15–20% of global trade settlement. Target year as cited by S. Ryabkov, Russian MFA.
What can you do today? Don’t wait until 2030. Download the app, complete KYC, link a card — all of these already work. Early users get priority access to new features and preferential rates as new countries open up.
Use the promo code at sign-up
While registering in the app, in the “Promo” or “Referral” section, enter our code. It gives you an early-user bonus, access to our English-language guides and help when something goes wrong with registration or payments. It is free — just a way to tell BRICS Pay you came in through our recommendation.
Tap the code — it lands in your phone’s clipboard. Then in the BRICS Pay app, open the “Promo” or “Referral” section (where promo codes go), long-press the field and choose “Paste”.