The most consequential expansion of BRICS may happen without a new currency, a dramatic fall in dollar reserves, or another flag being added to the summit table.
Modern Diplomacy’s latest data check on BRICS de-dollarization makes the immediate picture clear: the shift away from the dollar is real in specific corridors, especially where sanctions have pushed Russia and Iran towards alternatives, but it is not systemic. The dollar still accounted for 57.13 percent of allocated global reserves in the first quarter of 2026, while the renminbi held 1.99 percent. BRICS Pay remains far from the scale implied by some of the rhetoric surrounding it.
That should move the debate forward. A better benchmark for BRICS payments is the availability of credible additional routes for trade and settlement. Under India’s 2026 presidency, members are discussing links between domestic fast-payment systems and central bank digital currencies, although Reserve Bank of India Governor Sanjay Malhotra says the proposals remain at the discussion stage. The 2025 Rio de Janeiro Declaration likewise called for further work on the BRICS Cross-Border Payments Initiative, including interoperability with payment systems beyond the group.
Alongside this official process sits BRICS Pay, a project associated with the BRICS Business Council rather than a single intergovernmental BRICS payment system. Its developers describe a distributed network of gateways between national systems and envisage participation beyond formal members and partner countries. If those connections become operational at scale, BRICS will not need every participant to join the organization for its payment infrastructure to acquire geopolitical relevance.
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The central test is whether that infrastructure can remain useful to countries that do not share a common geopolitical position.
One Group, Several Financial Calculations
BRICS does not contain one financial strategy. Russia’s position has been shaped heavily by sanctions. The Bank of Russia’s own 2026–2028 financial-market program says Moscow intends to expand international settlement infrastructure and independent financial messaging channels, including the Financial Messaging System of the Bank of Russia (SPFS). Iran faces similar incentives to reduce exposure to Western-controlled channels.
China enters from a stronger position. It already operates the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), which by June 2026 counted 210 direct participants and 1,619 indirect participants. That gives Beijing an established infrastructure through which wider renminbi settlement can grow, even though the renminbi remains a small share of global reserves and international payments.
India’s calculation is different again. New Delhi is internationalizing the Unified Payments Interface and encouraging greater use of the rupee while preserving major economic, technological, and strategic relationships with the United States. The UAE remains deeply embedded in dollar-based global finance. Indonesia has been expanding local-currency settlement in several directions rather than attaching it to one geopolitical platform. Bank Indonesia’s Regulation of the Board of Governors No. 25/2026, effective in August, provides the regulatory framework for rupiah–Singapore dollar bilateral transactions through appointed banks. This is not a BRICS initiative. It shows that payment diversification is already being institutionalized through bilateral and regional channels as well.
These different motivations matter because the same payment connection can serve sanctions resilience in one capital, currency internationalization in another, and routine transaction efficiency elsewhere. BRICS can coordinate infrastructure without first reaching agreement on the future of the international monetary system.
Washington Raises the Political Cost
The United States makes that ambiguity harder to sustain. Donald Trump threatened in July 2025 to impose an additional 10 percent tariff on countries aligning themselves with what he described as BRICS’ “anti-American policies,” without clearly defining what would trigger the penalty.
That uncertainty changes the calculation for governments with substantial interests on both sides. A faster settlement route can be defended as economic efficiency. Local-currency transactions may lower some foreign-exchange friction and reduce exposure to disruption. Political costs rise when the same infrastructure is promoted as an instrument for weakening the dollar or circumventing US financial power.
BRICS therefore faces a design problem as much as a diplomatic one. A network that acquires an explicit anti-Western identity will become harder for India, the UAE, Indonesia, and potential participants outside BRICS to use without signalling alignment. A modular architecture leaves more room. National systems can remain sovereign, corridors can be added selectively, and local-currency settlement can coexist with dollar transactions and regional payment arrangements.
The Rio Declaration already points in that direction by referring to payments with “other nations.” BRICS Pay’s developers go further by envisaging gateways beyond formal membership. This distinction could determine the network’s reach.
From Dollar Replacement to Payment Optionality
For many countries in the Global South, the practical attraction is not a monetary revolution. Governments are trying to reduce remittance costs, accelerate trade settlement, manage foreign-exchange exposure, and avoid excessive dependence on any single external channel. One additional route can have value even when the dollar remains dominant.
BRICS does not need countries to join the organization for its payment infrastructure to matter. A government may reject formal membership yet connect to a corridor that benefits domestic firms or migrant workers. Transactions then produce repeated interaction among central banks, regulators, banks, and payment operators. Standards become familiar, operational practices adapt, and switching away from a useful connection becomes less trivial.
Financial infrastructure can generate leverage through repeated use long before diplomacy produces formal alignment.
This is where Protocol Power becomes concrete. Standards, access rules, and settlement routines can shape behavior across a network. Yet infrastructure alone does not create power. The latest Modern Diplomacy assessment is useful precisely because it separates larger payment pipes from actual monetary displacement: CIPS and other alternatives are expanding, while non-sanctioned BRICS members have not abandoned the dollar.
So the relevant test is tougher. Are the new routes trusted? Are they used consistently for ordinary commercial transactions rather than mainly sanctions-driven trade? Can participation expand beyond governments already politically motivated to reduce dollar exposure? Without those conditions, a payment network remains infrastructure without much geopolitical conversion.
Interoperability Exists Beyond BRICS
BRICS also has no monopoly on this logic. Nexus Global Payments was created to standardize connections among domestic instant-payment systems. India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand established the organization in 2025, and Indonesia joined as the sixth jurisdiction in 2026. A participating system connects once to Nexus and can then reach the other systems on the network instead of building separate bilateral integrations.
That comparison matters because it demonstrates that interoperability does not inherently require geopolitical bloc formation. I made a similar argument previously when writing about mBridge: alternative settlement infrastructure is more durable when it functions as a bridge between systems rather than another frontier of financial polarization.
BRICS has a harder version of the problem. Its prospective network brings together China, sanctioned powers, US strategic partners, and states determined to preserve room for maneuver. They can agree that cheaper and more resilient settlement is useful while continuing to disagree about sanctions, the dollar, and the wider international order.
Governance Is Where the Experiment Gets Hard
Technical connectivity eventually forces institutional choices. A wider network needs minimum agreement on anti-money-laundering controls, cybersecurity, and settlement finality. Liability rules and dispute mechanisms must also work when participants operate under different regulatory regimes.
Nexus illustrates the amount of institutional machinery required beneath interoperability. Its architecture includes governance, oversight, risk management, and common technical standards. BRICS faces additional political complications because sanctions can make an acceptable rule in one jurisdiction a source of legal or market exposure in another.
Too little coordination leaves a collection of bilateral corridors with a shared label. Heavy centralization creates the opposite problem by weakening the sovereign flexibility that attracts heterogeneous members and outsiders. BRICS therefore needs a workable minimum of common rules. The difficult part is keeping those rules credible when some participants want the infrastructure to remain commercially neutral and others see strategic value in making it explicitly geopolitical.
Can Utility Survive Geopolitical Rivalry?
There is no reason to assume that technical interoperability will automatically create durable influence. Businesses choose payment channels according to liquidity, convertibility, reliability, and cost; central banks must also consider financial stability and regulatory exposure. The dollar’s network effects remain formidable.
That uncertainty is exactly what makes BRICS payments worth watching. A network spanning China, Russia, and Iran alongside India, the UAE, Indonesia and other states with very different relationships with Washington is unusual because its participants do not agree on the international financial order they want.
If economic utility is sufficient to keep those countries on shared payment rails, the result will not necessarily be a BRICS-led financial order. It would instead suggest that international finance can become more networked without dividing neatly into rival blocs. If political pressure overwhelms that utility, payment infrastructure itself may eventually become another arena in which governments are forced to choose sides.
BRICS Pay therefore offers a test with implications far beyond the dollar debate: whether shared financial infrastructure can remain useful once the infrastructure itself becomes geopolitically contested.
