Aug
Why Bre-B Is an Opportunity for Card Networks—Not a Threat
We explain how this disruptor can actually unlock revenue from Colombia’s SMBs.
The quick take
| Why this matters | Bre-B is digitizing cash-based small business revenue in Colombia even faster than Pix digitized it in Brazil. Card networks are reading that only as a threat to debit volume, not as a credit opportunity. |
| Who it matters to | Executives at card networks, issuing banks, and payment processors operating in Colombia and anyone watching account-to-account payments scale across Latin America. |
| What to do about it | Build a commercial card program that turns Bre-B transaction data into credit decisions for small businesses, instead of competing with Bre-B for payment volume in a losing battle. |
| How to do it | Contact PCMI to get a custom action strategy and an intelligence roadmap to turn this article’s ideas into a viable revenue stream. |
Colombia has run on cash for a long time. As of last year, 78% of transactions in the country were still cash, according to Banco de la República.1 That is the backdrop against which Bre-B launched in September 2025: a free, instant, interoperable transfer system built to move money between any bank, cooperative, wallet, or fintech in seconds.
The system has moved fast. Bre-B processed more than 672 million transactions and registered over 100 million payment keys in its first six months, according to Banco de la República, which created and operates the platform.2 Bre-b transactional data shows monthly volume growth at 15%, with more than 80% of Colombians already using it. This card industry has read this as a threat to its business. They are only half right.
In June 2026 (10 months since launch), 13% of Bre-B transactions and 10% of volume are person-to-merchant purchases: money that used to move as cash between a customer and a small business now moves as a digital, trackable transfer. That share tracks closely with Pix’s own first year in Brazil, when person-to-merchant transactions also sat around 10% of volume. Six years into Pix, P2M transactions in Brazil have grown to 46% of transactions, though still only 11% of volume, evidence that these systems convert cash into digital commerce steadily, not instantly.3
Card networks fear that this trajectory ends with cards cut out of the flow. Based on the experience in Brazil, this fear is warranted for debit cards, but not for credit, whose volume in Brazil grew 11.4% in 2025, five years into Pix’s expansion. Debit is the actual casualty: its growth slowed and turned negative in 2024, four years after Pix launched. Credit, so far, continues to thrive.
This analysis clearly establishes three facts:
- A scaled, public A2A system effectively digitizes cash
- An A2A system systematically erodes the payments economics from money movement transactions
- It also preserves and reinforces the need for credit
Here’s the Opportunity
Every Bre-B transaction a small business receives is now a digital record: a timestamp, an amount, a counterparty. For years, these merchants operated in cash, invisible to any bank’s underwriting model. A store could be doing brisk business and still have no way to prove it to a lender. Bre-B, almost as a side effect, is building the credit file these merchants never had.
In Colombia, that favors large banks even more than it did in Brazil. Colombia’s fintech ecosystem is thinner than Brazil’s, so PCMI’s analysis suggests dominant banks such as Bancolombia and Davivienda, which already hold a large share of small business deposit accounts, will capture the largest share of the new Bre-B volume moving through their own rails. That volume, and the transaction history behind it, is exactly what a bank needs to begin justifying lending to a segment it has always treated as too risky to underwrite at scale.
10% of volume. 100% new credit data.
Every Bre-B transaction is a credit signal sitting outside your underwriting model right now. PCMI can help you read it before a competitor does.
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The Cost of Inaction for Card Networks
If card networks that wait for this to play out passively, they will lose more than debit share. Once P2M volume matures into B2B payments, still a small fraction of Bre-B activity today, alternative lenders and open banking-linked credit models will move in first. That has already happened elsewhere. In Brazil, NuPay issues credit that settles over Pix, cutting card networks out of the transaction entirely. In India, banks issue cards that run on UPI rails instead of card network rails. Colombia does not have to repeat that pattern, but only if card networks act while business-to-business volume is still the small piece of Bre-B it is today.
3 Moves Card Networks Can Make to Open This SMB Revenue Stream
Build a card-centric narrative for issuing banks. Most banks have not connected Bre-B data to credit decisioning yet. Card networks should make the case directly: incremental P2M volume from formerly cash-only merchants translates into credit issuing, and the easiest way to deploy this credit is via a commercial credit card. This creates interchange and interest revenue for the bank, both more monetizable than a transfer that, for most businesses, drive scale rather than real revenue.
Build a product roadmap from account-to-account activity to a commercial card. Define what product offering, capabilities, and messaging strategy issuers need to move cash-dominant merchants to A2A-driven digitization to a starter commercial card holder, and eventually to a more advanced one. That roadmap should specify the partnerships, credit scoring inputs, card features, marketing channels, and overall revenue model.
Launch a joint marketing campaign aimed at the small businesses themselves, celebrating their digitization and growth. The message does not need to be subtle: you are digital now, you are entering the formal economy, you are growing; here is a card built for what you are already doing, and that will take you to the next level.
All this aligns with Colombia’s open finance rules. Decree 0368 of 2026,4 which overhauls the country’s open finance system, requires a merchant’s prior, explicit authorization before any bank shares its transaction data, but it does not block that data from reaching a card issuer once that authorization is given.³ The decree’s stated objectives include promoting financial and credit inclusion through data access, which is precisely the outcome a Bre-B-to-commercial-card program produces. The open question in Colombia is whether issuers and card networks will build the credit models and partnerships to act on the data before someone else does.
3 months to a commercial card roadmap.
PCMI can size the opportunity, test issuer appetite, and build the business case your team needs to move first, not last.
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SME credit is one of the largest underserved lending markets in Latin America: in fact, the International Finance Corporation estimates that 87% of the potential financing needs of MSMEs in Latin America and the Caribbean remains unmet. In addition, SME credit is actively being digitized and financed by players outside the card industry. Getting into commercial card issuing now, while B2B volume on Bre-B is still small and while banks are still deciding how to underwrite this segment, is a three-month strategy exercise that can starts now; it doesn’t have to be a multi-year transformation. The frameworks below outline where to start.
| Metric to measure | PCMI analytical framework | Decisions enabled |
| Bre-B P2M volume and growth by segment | PCMI Market Mapping: P2M sizing and segmentation | Which merchant segments already have enough transaction history to support a credit decision |
| Issuer appetite and constraints for SME lending | PCMI Commercial Intelligence: Issuer readiness and partnership assessment | What credit scoring partners or data inputs banks need to move from analysis to approval |
| SME awareness of and receptivity to a commercial card | PCMI Voice of the Customer: SME perception and adoption drivers | What marketing narrative moves a Bre-B merchant to apply for a card |
| The economic model: Revenue potential | PCMI Strategic Road-Mapping | How much money is on the table and how do I capture it |
The question for card networks in Colombia is not whether Bre-B will digitize small business commerce. It already has. The question is who gets to lend against it.
Next Steps
Here is what PCMI concretely can do to help a card network or issuing bank tap into this SMB payments flow, drawn from the same engagement model behind this article.
In a typical three-month engagement, PCMI will:
- Size the opportunity. Quantify how much Bre-B person-to-merchant volume is moving through small businesses that sit outside a bank’s current credit models today, segmented by sector and length of transaction history.
- Test issuer appetite. Interview banks and card networks directly to learn what they would need to see, in data, governance, or partnership terms, before extending commercial credit against Bre-B transaction history, and what is holding them back today.
- Identify credit-scoring partners. Where a bank’s existing underwriting model cannot yet make sense of Bre-B data, PCMI identifies and evaluates alternative credit-scoring partners built for this kind of transaction history.
- Build the business case. Combine an SME survey, an issuer survey, and revenue and profitability modeling into a single business case a card network can bring to its issuing bank partners.
- Write the narrative. Develop the card-centric thought leadership and marketing narrative that convinces issuing banks internally and small businesses externally, the same argument this article previews.
This is a defined, three-month engagement, not a multi-year transformation. It produces a strategy, a business case, and the data behind both.
Ready to scope it for your organization? Contact PCMI to get started.
Sources
- Banco de la República data, cited in Valentina Meneses, “Colombia’s Bre-B Won’t Replace Cash Or Cards, But It Can Still Change Everything,” PCMI, September 29, 2025. ↩︎
- Banco de la República data, cited in, “Bre-B superó los $105 billones en transacciones durante sus primeros seis meses,” Forbes Colombia, June 16, 2026. ↩︎
- PCMI analysis of data from Banco Central do Brasil, Pix Statistics. ↩︎
- Decreto Número 0368 de 2026, Ministerio de Hacienda y Crédito Público, República de Colombia, April 7, 2026. ↩︎
All Bre-B and Pix transaction volume figures not otherwise footnoted are PCMI analysis, drawn from PCMI’s interview with Lindsay Lehr, Managing Director and Co-founder, PCMI.
