Pix is basically a commercial name for two services:
- SPI: responsible for the payments
- DICT: responsible for mapping keys to accounts
The API documentation of those services are available, but only banks can use them. When a person wants to send money to another, there's an option in the bank app for sending through Pix.
Then you have many options to define to whom you'll send that money:
- typing the bank account information
- using the Pix key (which can be an phone, email, CPF/CNPJ (brazillian documents) or a generated key)
- scanning a QR code
Note that the two latter options don't require the account information. That resolution is done by DICT.
After that, you type how much you'll send (sometimes the QR code already contains this information). Then it'll send through SPI.
This sounds really cool. Is there a verification step where you confirm that the right number or identifier was entered for the first payment to someone? That's always one of my biggest concerns and I don't want to enter a number twice as the verification.
The UX is standardized by the Central Bank and they mandate a step showing the name of the person/company associated with that Pix key before you make the payment. So you can always double-check.
Does the format for the ID have a check digit in it? Like IBANs and credit card numbers can both be checked offline by an algorithm to tell you that you've made a typo.
From my reading, the system seems like it's intended to be used with a connected device and scanned/copypasted rather than typed or read over the phone.
You can see how it works in this video, after 3:30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wvz0Yiss4Go. It's in portuguese, but I think you will understand how the interface works.
Note that it is from a bank app (Nubank), Pix itself is not an app. Other banks have similar interfaces
- SPI: responsible for the payments
- DICT: responsible for mapping keys to accounts
The API documentation of those services are available, but only banks can use them. When a person wants to send money to another, there's an option in the bank app for sending through Pix.
Then you have many options to define to whom you'll send that money:
- typing the bank account information
- using the Pix key (which can be an phone, email, CPF/CNPJ (brazillian documents) or a generated key)
- scanning a QR code
Note that the two latter options don't require the account information. That resolution is done by DICT.
After that, you type how much you'll send (sometimes the QR code already contains this information). Then it'll send through SPI.
And yeah, it's really, really fast.