American CEO says he is “envious” of Pix, investigated by Trump

“I’m jealous of what the Brazilian Central Bank did when creating Pix. I wish we had that here,” said Fink at an event at BlackRock’s headquarters in New York. He said he believes that Brazil and India already have what he called a “digital mentality”.

In January, during a panel at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, the businessman had already praised both countries.

“I believe the movement towards tokenization and decimalization is necessary. It is ironic that we see two emerging countries leading the world in decimalization, tokenization and digitization of their currencies: Brazil and India. I think we need to move very quickly to do this,” Fink said at the time.

“We would be reducing fees. We would promote greater democratization by reducing costs if we had all investments on a tokenized platform, where it was possible to move from a tokenized money market fund to stocks and bonds, back and forth. With a common blockchain, we can reduce corruption,” he argued.

Last year, the government of American President Donald Trump opened an investigation into commercial practices in Brazil, which aims to investigate issues such as the sale of pirated products on Rua 25 de Março, in São Paulo, and Pix, which, according to the White House, could harm the competitiveness of American companies in the payments sector in the Brazilian market.

At Davos, Fink said the US adoption of a single payment and financial transaction platform would need to be discussed, but claimed there would be major advantages.

“I would argue that, yes, perhaps we have more dependence on (adopting) a single blockchain, something we could all argue about, but, that said, activities are probably processed more securely than ever before”, argued the businessman, who will participate, alongside other entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk and Tim Cook (Apple), in Trump’s visit to China this week.