Key Facts
—The idea. Brazil is launching a kind of Pix for business credit, a public system that lets a company turn an unpaid invoice into something it can quickly borrow against.
—The date. The central bank switches it on June 30 at a ceremony in Brasilia, with the name duplicata escritural, meaning the digital version of a paper IOU.
—The prize. Unpaid invoices are a roughly ten-trillion-real ($1.99 trillion) pile every year, but only about one in ten is ever sold or borrowed against today.
—The fix. Giving each invoice one tamper-proof digital record stops the same bill being pledged twice, which is meant to cut fraud and lower the cost of borrowing.
