Banco de la República's annual report on financial infrastructure and payment instruments, published July 17, 2026, shows Colombia's Bre-B instant transfer network outpaced traditional interbank transfers by a factor of 2.5 in its first six months of operation, a figure drawn directly from the central bank's settlement data. Separate analyses by the Digital Frontiers Institute and the April 2026 "Connecting the Dots in Payments" study put the total transaction count above 638 million and the aggregate value at roughly $25 billion. Together, the figures confirm that Colombia has executed an unusually rapid retail payment transition, with implications that extend well beyond Latin America.

What Bre-B Is and How It Works

Bre-B (Billetera de Bajo Valor Interoperada) is Colombia's interoperable instant payment system, built and operated by Banco de la República. It launched in a controlled pilot on September 23, 2025, and went fully nationwide on October 6, 2025. The system was modelled on Brazil's Pix, sharing the same core pillars: 24/7 availability, alias-based addressing, and immediate settlement. It allows transfers between any participating bank, wallet, or fintech using an alias (phone number, national ID, or email) rather than an account number. Settlement runs through a mechanism called the MOL (Mecanismo Operativo de Liquidación). Since October 2025, the MOL has operated on a 24/7 real-time gross settlement basis, clearing transactions in real time against deposit accounts held directly at the central bank. By April 2026, the network counted 34 to 35 million registered users, more than 103 million registered payment aliases, and 170 or more participating institutions. The average Bre-B transaction value is approximately USD $43 (COP 157,193), which places the projected post-subsidy fee in practical context: after the current zero-fee period ends in October 2028, the estimated per-transfer cost is roughly COP 6.46, or about one U.S. cent. Transaction fees are zero through October 2028, subsidized by the central bank.

The Wider Picture From the 2026 Report

Bre-B is the headline figure, but the report covers the full architecture of Colombia's financial market infrastructure. The CUD, Colombia's large-value interbank settlement system, recorded a 19.5% year-on-year rise in average daily settled value during 2025, even as transaction count fell 15%. The central bank attributes that divergence to liquidity-absorbing sell/buy-back operations rather than organic growth. The DCV securities depository was up 16% in daily settled value, driven by open market operations and liquidity-providing facilities. Card payments grew 21% in value and 19% in volume. Automated clearing house transfers through ACH Colombia and ACH Cenit rose 15% in value and 2.3% in transaction count. Checks continued to lose share, while cash remained the most commonly used instrument in everyday transactions despite declining usage, a structural divergence signaling a two-tier payment reality reflected in a simultaneous rise in currency in circulation.

The report also addresses post-trade interoperability as a distinct pillar of financial infrastructure modernization. The nuam exchange integration, which links BVC Colombia, the Lima Stock Exchange, and Chile's Santiago Stock Exchange, represents a significant structural development in regional capital markets. Its inclusion in the report underscores that Colombia's infrastructure agenda extends beyond retail payments into securities settlement.

The MOL as a Design Choice Worth Examining

The settlement architecture underlying Bre-B is not a minor technical detail. By routing retail instant payments through real-time gross settlement against central bank deposit accounts, Colombia has effectively placed the central bank at the core of retail payment finality. That is the same design logic being studied in wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) proposals worldwide. The BIS, through its Project Agorá initiative involving eight central banks and more than 40 private institutions, published findings in May 2026 confirming that tokenized central bank reserves combined with tokenized commercial bank deposits can enable atomic, multi-currency, 24/7 wholesale settlement, meaning a transaction either completes fully across all legs or fails entirely, with no intermediate risk. The BIS General Manager Pablo Hernández de Cos framed the broader argument in June 2026: "By integrating digital innovation such as tokenisation into the existing financial architecture, authorities can shape the future of money, the economy and the financial system in the public interest while preserving trust." Colombia's MOL is not tokenized infrastructure, but its settlement logic runs on the same institutional premise: that anchoring payment finality in central bank money reduces systemic risk and preserves public trust in the payment system. The distinction between the two approaches matters for policymakers, but the directional overlap is what makes Colombia's experience a useful reference point for CBDC design discussions.

Why This Matters for Africa and South Asia

Payment system designers in Ghana, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka are working on structurally similar problems: connecting fragmented payment ecosystems, extending digital access to populations that remain heavily cash-dependent, and keeping central bank money at the center of settlement. Colombia's data gives those conversations a rare empirical reference point.

At the time of Bre-B's launch, 77.8% of all transactions in Colombia were still cash-based, rising to 87.5% among lower-income populations, and only 49% of adults were making or receiving digital payments. Six months after launch, the system had recorded more than 638 million transactions. The Digital Frontiers Institute noted one risk that comes with that speed: fraud. QR spoofing, phishing, and AI-enhanced social engineering schemes have targeted Bre-B users, particularly those new to digital finance. Fraud schemes targeting Bre-B users have grown more sophisticated because, as the Digital Frontiers Institute noted, "their sophistication has increased due to AI-powered tools." For any central bank scaling a similar system, that warning lands before, not after, the infrastructure is built.

The BIS has separately cautioned that dollar-denominated stablecoins pose particular risks to monetary sovereignty in developing economies, specifically because they lack what it calls "singleness," the ability to redeem different money forms at par for central bank money. Colombia's policy response is explicit in its investment: build domestic rails fast enough and cheap enough that informal dollarization of payment flows becomes less attractive. Whether that logic holds will depend on how Bre-B performs as the fee subsidy expires in October 2028 and whether cross-border linking with Brazil and Peru, reportedly under discussion among central banks in the region, materializes into a functioning corridor product.

Colombia's remittance profile makes that cross-border question especially relevant to readers in Africa and South Asia. With 29.6% of remittances flowing from the United States, alongside significant flows from Venezuela and Spain, Colombia's corridor dependencies mirror those of many African and South Asian markets. India's Gulf corridor, Ghana's UK corridor, and the integration ambitions behind PAPSS in Africa and proposed SAARC payment linkages in South Asia all face the same structural challenge: building interoperable domestic rails capable of anchoring cross-border flows before stablecoins fill the gap. Colombia's early data offers a template, and its friction points offer a warning.

Colombia has also moved further than most regional peers in formalizing its crypto regulatory framework, a development that adds important context to the stablecoin competition described above. The country ranks 29th globally in crypto adoption, with more than 5 million digital asset holders and $6.7 billion in on-chain transaction volume recorded in 2024. In December 2025, Colombia's tax authority DIAN issued Resolution 000240, requiring registered crypto asset service providers to report all transactions to regulators, with an automatic alert threshold of $50,000, beginning with 2026 data. That combination of high adoption and structured reporting infrastructure places Colombia ahead of most Latin American peers in integrating digital assets into its regulatory architecture. For policymakers in markets where stablecoin uptake is rising faster than domestic rail capacity, Colombia now offers a rare example of a country moving on both fronts simultaneously.