Brazil's banking system is renowned for its efficiency and the Brazilian Payment System (Sistema de Pagamentos Brasileiro or SPB) is a good example of how Brazilian IT companies are prepared to understand complex business requirements, develop and implement home grown world class solutions. Since the mid 1990s Brazil has overhauled its payments system in order to cope with the period of hyper inflation which the country lived in the beginning of that decade.
Operated by the Central Bank of Brazil, the SPB allows all inter-bank transfer of funds in Brazil to be made in real time, which greatly reduces systemic risks: the risk that if a bank goes bankrupt it leads other institutions to break in a domino effect. With a high degree of automation, the SPB operates with increasing use of electronic means to transfer funds and settle obligations, and nearly 100 per cent of all securities are dematerialized.
Overall, the development of the SPB was focused in strengthening the financial institutions and decreasing the government stake in banking activities with the goal of reducing the chances of an eventual crisis in the financial system and, therefore, in the country’s economy. Today Brazil’s inflation rate (projected by the Central Bank in 5.1% for 2005) is under control and the economy is growing healthily.
The Brazilian voting system is among the most modern in the world. Since 1996, all votes in national elections in Brazil are cast through electronic ballots, which allow results to be known within 24 hours. The system was initially developed in the 80s, when Brazil returned to democratic rule. The country has invested heavily in the modernization of its electoral machinery, spending over half a billion dollars in the last four years alone.
In the last national election, over 110 million voters participated, electing 5,559 mayors and 48,015 municipal council members. They voted at 332,000 polling stations nationwide, from Indian reserves in the most remote areas of the Amazon to heavily populated southern cities of Brazil. Once the polls close, votes are counted electronically and the results of each precinct is encrypted and recorded on a diskette by the voting machine. This information is then sent online to the regional electoral court in the capital of each state.
Finally, the results are certified and immediately retransmitted to the Superior Electoral Court in Brasilia, Brazil’s capital, and made public. Hackers do not pose a risk, for the system is completely isolated from other online services. The electronic ballots, designed to accommodate people who don’t read or with disabilities, won the people’s confidence and decreased voting fraud. The Brazilian voting system has been adapted by other nations and, in the next months, the country will send its electronic balloting system to Honduras, Bolivia and Panama.
Brazil was a pioneer in the development of online tax statements filing, and today 95% of individual taxpayers and 100% of corporations file their returns online, in a secure system able to simultaneously process thousands of filings (last year, the system received about 30 million documents). Created in 1997, the E-taxation application developed in Brazil is cost efficient and has greatly increased compliance with tax administration procedures. The system has a digital certification mechanism developed to protect taxpayers’ information.
In a ground-breaking decision, Brazil announced this year that it will gradually adopt the use of open-source software in ministries and state owned companies in an attempt to save hundreds of million dollars a year by switching from Windows to free alternatives, like Linux. The Brazilian government believes this is a vital development issue in a country where Internet expansion – in terms of number of people served – still has much potential. Through tax breaks, the government is subsidizing the sale of computers based on open-source software to low-income families.
To discuss these and other technologies, please visit the Brazil IT booth and several other Brazilian IT providers, located in the Outsourcing and IT Services Marketplace. For more information, visit www.brazil-it.com. To schedule interviews with Brazilian IT executives, please contact Flavia Sekles at the Brazil Information Center, (202) 471-4020 or (202) 423-3080 (for the duration of the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2005).