BRICS is Quietly Rewriting the ‘Rules of Global Settlement’

For years, the debate over global finance has fixated on currencies — dollars versus yuan, reserves versus deficits. The more consequential shift, however, is happening one layer below. It concerns settlement infrastructure: the pipes through which trade instructions flow, sanctions are enforced, and power is exercised invisibly.

That debate is now unmistakably a BRICS debate.

The five original members of BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — along with newer entrants, share little ideologically. What they increasingly share is discomfort with a settlement architecture dominated by SWIFT, and by extension, the US-led monetary order.

This is not rebellion. It is risk management.

The Common BRICS Problem

Collectively, BRICS accounts for over a third of global GDP (PPP terms) and a growing share of world trade. Yet an overwhelming portion of that trade is still settled through dollar-centric correspondent banking chains, routed via SWIFT.

The consequences are threefold.

First, transaction costs remain elevated for intra-BRICS trade, even when no Western counterparty is involved. Second, trade data — volumes, counterparties, pricing proxies — remains visible to external actors. Third, exposure to sanctions risk persists, even for countries not directly targeted, as banks over-comply to avoid secondary penalties.

In short, BRICS trades with one another but settles as if it does not trust itself.

Fragmented Alternatives, Emerging Pattern

Individual BRICS members have already acted.

China’s CIPS enables cross-border yuan settlements and now connects hundreds of financial institutions across continents. Russia’s SPFS was built under duress yet has proven resilient for domestic and select cross-border use.

These systems were born of necessity, not ideology. Their limitations are equally clear. CIPS is currency specific. SPFS is geographically constrained. Neither aspires, yet to be a neutral, multilateral platform.

That is precisely where BRICS comes in.

Why a BRICS Settlement Layer Makes Sense

A BRICS-aligned settlement framework would not seek to dethrone SWIFT. That would be unrealistic and unnecessary. Its purpose would be narrower and more strategic: to facilitate intra-BRICS and BRICS-plus trade without default dependence on Western-controlled rails.

The logic is compelling.

BRICS trade is already large enough to justify a dedicated infrastructure layer. Local-currency settlements are rising, albeit slowly. Development finance is increasingly routed through BRICS institutions. What is missing is a common messaging and settlement backbone that treats BRICS trade as first-class traffic, not an exception.

The institutional anchor already exists in the New Development Bank. What it lacks is a mandate expansion — from financing projects to enabling payments.

Design, Not Disruption

A BRICS settlement alternative would need to be deliberately boring. No ideological branding. No currency wars. No zero-sum posturing.

Its features would be technical and political in equal measure:

• local-currency optionality rather than compulsion;
• data localization and shared governance;
• cost-recovery pricing instead of trade-linked commissions;
• and interoperability with SWIFT during a long transition.

Most importantly, no single member, not even China, could control it. The credibility of the system would depend on that restraint.

This is where India’s role becomes pivotal.

India as the Balancer

Among BRICS members, India occupies a unique position. It is systemically important but not sanction heavy. Digitally capable but institutionally cautious. Politically non-aligned yet globally trusted.

India has demonstrated, through its domestic digital public infrastructure, that scale and neutrality can coexist. Translating that philosophy to a BRICS settlement layer would not only protect India’s own interests; it would reassure smaller BRICS and BRICS-plus economies wary of exchanging one dependency for another.

In effect, India could serve as the constitutional conscience of a BRICS financial architecture.

The Strategic Endgame

Critics often frame de-dollarization as an ideological project. In practice, what BRICS is pursuing is far more prosaic: insulation.

A multipolar world cannot run on a unipolar settlement system indefinitely. The mismatch creates fragility, resentment, and periodic shocks. Settlement diversification reduces all three.

If BRICS succeeds, even partially, it will not end the dollar’s dominance. What it will end is the presumption that access to global trade must pass through a single, surveilled, sanctionable corridor.

That shift would be quiet. Markets would adjust. Headlines would be muted. But the strategic implications would be profound.

Empires rarely fall to frontal assault. They erode when alternatives become normal.

The question for BRICS is no longer whether such alternatives are desirable. It is whether the bloc has the institutional discipline to build them, and the strategic patience to let them grow.

In the politics of pipes, whoever offers the second route eventually changes the map.