Colombia's Bre-B reaches 83% of adults in its first year, and the central bank turns to business payments

Colombia's instant payment system Bre-B, run under Banco de la República and launched in October 2025, is now used by 83% of the country's adults, according to an analysis EBANX published on 6 October 2026 from central bank and population data. Brazil's Pix had reached 65% at the same point in its life and took close to three times as long to hit the level Bre-B has reached in twelve months. The volumes have grown to match. EBANX counts 36 million active users, 32 million of them individuals, more than 8 million transactions a day, three times the first month's daily rate, and close to USD 80 billion moved since launch. Set against that, only about 24% of Colombian adults hold a credit card, according to the financial supervisor, which leaves cards reaching under a third of the people Bre-B now reaches. The merchant evidence is still thin but pointed. EBANX describes one unnamed global retailer that switched Bre-B on for 5% of its Colombian shoppers and, over three weeks, reported checkout conversion rising from 20% to 50%, a 98.2% payment success rate and 5% incremental revenue, with 45% of Bre-B payers new to the retailer on its platform. These are a single provider's figures from one case and should be read as such. The next step is regulatory. The central bank is preparing rules for business-to-consumer use such as utilities, recurring payments and payroll, with a final text expected by the end of 2026, and is working on a shared protocol for refunds, disputes and outages across the connected systems. Colombia's digital commerce market is put at about USD 59 billion and forecast to reach USD 73 billion by 2028, which makes it the third largest in Latin America and a market where a card-led checkout now misses most of the adult population.