By Sai Krish Rai and Rohit Pahan

De-dollarisation has gained renewed attention, as Russia’s experience since 2022 has shown how access to international financial infrastructure can become a geopolitical vulnerability. In March 2022, the European Union excluded seven Russian banks from SWIFT, restricting their access to the financial messaging network used for cross-border transactions. This strengthened incentives among emerging economies to explore local-currency settlement and alternative payment arrangements. BRICS has responded with its Cross-Border Payments Initiative, examining greater interoperability among national payment systems. The New Delhi Declaration, adopted unanimously by BRICS leaders on 12 September 2026 at the 18th Summit, carried this agenda forward, but its language on payments remained carefully incremental rather than transformative. This paper argues that BRICS Pay is a meaningful hedge against dependence on existing financial infrastructure, rather than a genuine SWIFT challenger, at least in the near term, and the Declaration’s cautious phrasing reinforces rather than undercuts that argument.

What is BRICS Pay Actually?

BRICS Pay is not about creating a currency; it is about handling cross-border payments. The goal is to improve how BRICS countries’ national payment systems work together, making transactions faster, cheaper and less reliant on existing financial systems, while encouraging settlement in local currencies. This does not mean full de-dollarisation: a payment system is about how money moves; de-dollarisation is about the dollar’s role in trade, reserves and global finance. Even after New Delhi, BRICS Pay remains under development rather than a fully operational, “bloc-wide system” that can replace SWIFT.

Momentum Building: The Case for BRICS Pay

The strongest argument for BRICS Pay is not that it can immediately replace SWIFT but that the need for an alternative has become increasingly practical. After 2022, Russia was excluded from parts of the SWIFT network, showing how risky it is to depend on systems that can be influenced by political pressure. Since then, local-currency settlement has moved from talk to action. India and Russia, for example, have set up payment systems using the rupee and the rouble; by September 2026, the two currencies were reportedly facilitating 96% of bilateral trade, which reached about $70 billion in 2024. India has also created local-currency settlement arrangements with the UAE, Indonesia, the Maldives and Mauritius. Meanwhile, China’s CIPS shows how alternative payment infrastructure can expand beyond national borders: by the end of 2025, it had 193 participants and 1,573 indirect participants across 124 countries and regions. These developments show BRICS does not need to build a financial system from the ground up; its real opportunity may be to link existing systems, cut dependence on dollar-backed channels, and give members more options when they face political or financial restrictions.

The Constraints That Remain

Yet the biggest obstacle to BRICS Pay is not technological; it is financial and political. Local-currency settlement works best when both currencies are liquid and easily convertible. The India-Russia experience illustrates the problem: Russian businesses faced an “overhang” of rupees because the rupee is only partly convertible on the capital account, while trade was tilted towards Indian purchases of Russian oil. Newer arrangements have improved settlement, but the episode shows bypassing the dollar can create a different problem: what happens when a country accumulates a currency it cannot easily use elsewhere?

Trust is another hurdle. BRICS is not a politically unified bloc, and China’s enormous economic weight raises the question of how willing other members would be to depend on Chinese-controlled infrastructure. China’s CIPS is already substantial, but its scale does not make it a politically neutral BRICS platform, and alternative payment arrangements within BRICS remain largely bilateral, reflecting the bloc’s internal differences.

Then come network effects. SWIFT connects more than 11,500 institutions across over 200 countries and territories. Replacing such a network requires far more than software; banks need new connections, compliance systems and technical standards, and a reason to join. A payment network becomes valuable when many banks already use it, creating a cycle of trust and liquidity that BRICS Pay would have to overcome.

Nor does BRICS possess a common currency. National-currency settlement can reduce dollar exposure in particular transactions, but it also leaves participants managing exchange-rate and liquidity risks between multiple currencies. Finally, the dollar’s structural position remains formidable: the BIS found it was on one side of 89.2% of global FX transactions in 2025, while the IMF reported it represented 57.13% of global official foreign-exchange reserves in the first quarter of 2026.

What the New Delhi Declaration Actually Says?

The New Delhi Declaration gives this reality check an official anchor. Its payments paragraph records only that the BRICS Payment Task Force should continue discussions, building on existing work, toward practical cross-border payment solutions, not that a bloc-wide system has been agreed. It explicitly notes there is no “one-size-fits-all approach,” language that concedes the fragmentation this paper treats as BRICS Pay’s central constraint. That caution looks deliberate: reporting citing Bloomberg indicated India, as chair, resisted locking in a single settlement system partly to avoid BRICS being cast as explicitly anti-dollar or anti-Western. Some summit coverage described BRICS Pay more dramatically, as a network already stitching together India’s UPI, China’s CIPS and Russia’s SPFS. The declaration’s own, measured text supports a narrower reading: continued study and voluntary cooperation, not deployment. New Delhi does not overturn the argument above; it illustrates it, since the summit’s most concrete payments outcome was another mandate to keep talking rather than a launch.

Realistic Trajectory

BRICS Pay will likely not make SWIFT disappear. Instead, a parallel network may grow, giving members more choices on trade routes where sanctions, high fees or political tension make old routes less attractive. The India–Russia settlement shows local-currency payments can work at scale, and China’s CIPS shows new financial infrastructure can cross borders, but these examples do not equal full de-dollarisation; the dollar still has liquidity, wide use and a global role that is hard to match. BRICS Pay would need progress in currency convertibility, cross-border rule coordination, deeper markets and trust before it could seriously challenge SWIFT. The New Delhi Declaration’s exploratory language on linking payment systems and CBDCs confirms this growth will stay slow rather than revolutionary. The likely path is de-risking rather than de-dollarisation: reducing dependence on old systems without replacing them completely.

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