Itaú will allow customers to make Pix using another bank’s balance

Itaú Unibanco will allow the use of the payment initiator for individual customers. The release will be in stages, for the more than 90 thousand employees and, later, for more than 30 million customers.

The bank expects the functionality to be available to all PF customers in the first half of November. Through it, they will be able to Pix the Itaú application using funds deposited in other banks. Bradesco started operating the functionality this month, and Banco do Brasil already allows Pixing from other banks to BB without leaving the application.

The payment initiator allows the customer to grant a kind of prior authorization for a financial institution to make payments for him. Part of the open finance framework, the tool allows you to pay with Pix in e-commerce by skipping a series of steps, for example. It also opens up the possibility of paying the bill in one bank using money deposited in another.

For now, the payment initiator only uses Pix, but the idea of ​​the Central Bank is to insert other forms of payment into the system in the future.

“Customers will be able to rely on the experience of Itaú channels to manage their accounts at other institutions with greater ease. Our ambition is to become the main financial management channel chosen by our own clients”, says Marcos Cavagnoli, director of Digital Cash Management and Open Finance at Itaú.

The bank tested it with a small base of customers and employees before bringing the functionality to a broad audience. Itaú is one of the few financial institutions in the country authorized by the BC to operate as an initiator – in addition to it, BB, Bradesco and BTG Pactual, among the large banks, are authorized, in addition to digital competitors, such as Mercado Pago.