For two decades, BRICS summits have oscillated between fanfare and scepticism. The original five — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — promised a more representative global order, then spent years issuing statements that did little to disturb the architecture built in Washington after 1945. By 2025, the stage in Rio looks different. New members from the Gulf and Africa have joined. China’s lending has slowed, Western development banks are cautious, and the Global South’s grievances about debt, dollar dominance and rating agencies are louder and more organised. The bloc is no longer asking for a seat at someone else’s table. It is talking openly about building a small, experimental table of its own.

From Political Club to Financial Project

For most of its life, BRICS functioned as a political brand: a loose coalition signalling dissatisfaction with Western dominance, but without the instruments to change much. The creation of the New Development Bank (NDB) and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) after the global financial crisis was supposed to change that. Here, finally, were institutions with balance sheets, not just declarations. Yet their impact remained modest. NDB lending grew gradually rather than explosively; the CRA stayed largely hypothetical, overshadowed by the IMF’s firepower and the dollar’s liquidity.

The shift around 2025 is not driven by a sudden surge in BRICS technical capacity. It is driven by the world around it. Sanctions campaigns, supply-chain shocks, pandemic aftershocks and repeated episodes of dollar tightening have made the vulnerabilities of the Global South painfully visible. Countries that might once have treated talk of alternative payment rails and local-currency trade as diplomatic theatre now see them as hedging tools. BRICS is discovering that institutional relevance arrives not when the architecture is ideal, but when the incumbents overplay their hand.

The Existing Toolbox: NDB, CRA and Local Currency Trade

In institutional terms, BRICS already has three main levers. The New Development Bank, headquartered in Shanghai with regional offices across several members, lends in multiple currencies to infrastructure and sustainable development projects. It was designed to be faster and less doctrinaire than the World Bank, with modest but real governance concessions to emerging borrowers. The Contingent Reserve Arrangement is a pooled liquidity mechanism that, in theory, allows members to access foreign currency support in times of stress. In practice, it has been used sparingly, constrained by internal design and the enduring convenience of the IMF.

The third lever barely exists on paper but dominates the rhetoric: local currency trade settlement. Several members have experimented bilaterally with invoicing and settling trades in their own currencies instead of the dollar. Banks have opened more swap lines; central banks muse about reducing their exposure to US Treasuries. None of this yet amounts to a rival reserve currency. But taken together, it begins to sketch the outline of a parallel infrastructure: thin, incomplete, but there.

How Big Is BRICS, Really?

Supporters like to point out that, after expansion, BRICS countries collectively account for a large share of global population and a rising share of output and trade. Critics counter that aggregation hides internal contradictions: rivalries between India and China, sanctions on Russia, fiscal constraints in key Latin members, domestic political turmoil.

The numbers show potential rather than inevitability. BRICS is large enough to matter systemically. It is not yet coherent enough to dictate terms. The Rio summit takes place in this gap: between aggregate heft and institutional thinness.

De-dollarisation: Signal or Substance?

Much of the Western commentary on BRICS focuses on “de-dollarisation” as if it were a binary switch. Either the dollar rules, or it collapses. Reality is slower and duller. Most cross-border contracts will continue to be denominated in dollars for a long time because the dollar offers depth, liquidity and habit. What is at stake in Rio is something more incremental: whether BRICS countries can carve out pockets of reduced dollar exposure in specific corridors of trade and finance.

That might mean more use of local currencies in energy deals between members, or in trade of commodities and manufactured goods where both sides are willing to bear some volatility. It could mean expanding swap lines and settlement platforms so that a bank in São Paulo can settle with a counterpart in Johannesburg without routing every transaction through New York. None of this dethrones the dollar. But it does begin to erode its monopoly on convenience, which is where power in the system largely resides.

Competing Visions Inside the Bloc

The hardest constraints on BRICS are internal. China, with the largest balance sheet and deepest financial system, naturally imagines a world in which its own institutions and currency play a central role. India, wary of dependency on Beijing, prefers a looser, more plural architecture. Russia, heavily sanctioned, pushes for aggressive workarounds that others may view as risky. Brazil and South Africa want more voice for the Global South but remain conscious of their ties to Western capital and export markets. New members from the Gulf and Africa arrive with their own priorities: commodity revenue management, diversification, hedging against Western policy shocks.

These differences are why efforts to create a single BRICS currency remain mostly rhetorical. The idea is appealing as a symbol, but unworkable in practice. No member is willing to surrender monetary sovereignty. No one wants to inherit another’s inflation, banking crises or fiscal fights. The feasible path runs through interoperability, not fusion: making it easier to hold, swap and settle in each other’s currencies without pretending they can be welded into one.

The Gulf and the New Triangle of Power

The entry of Gulf states into the BRICS orbit complicates and strengthens the picture. Oil producers bring large pools of capital, strategic control over hydrocarbon flows and growing ambitions in development finance. Their participation makes it easier to imagine BRICS-backed energy contracts, investment funds and liquidity lines that recycle petrodollars through non-Western channels.

At the same time, the Gulf’s close ties to Western markets and security structures mean it cannot simply pivot into an oppositional bloc. What emerges instead is a more triangular world. Washington still anchors the dominant institutions and reserve currency. Beijing remains a central lender, manufacturer and technology hub. The Gulf, embedded in BRICS and beyond, increasingly acts as a swing financial power: able to stabilise or complicate crises in the Global South with targeted deposits and funds.

Can BRICS Finance Actually Reach the Global South?

For many low- and middle-income countries watching Rio, the test of BRICS is brutally simple: does it provide money when it is needed, on terms that are better or at least different from the IMF, the World Bank and traditional bond markets? Here the record is mixed. The NDB has approved a portfolio of projects across members and a few non-members, often with greater tolerance for local preferences and policy space. But its total lending still trails far behind the established multilaterals. Emergency liquidity, meanwhile, is still largely a dollar and IMF story.

There is scope for BRICS to do more in narrowly defined niches: co-financing climate-related infrastructure, supporting regional payment systems, backing local-currency bond markets, offering limited swap arrangements that help members ride out short-term shocks. None of these will replace a full IMF programme. They do, however, give finance ministries a slightly wider set of options in negotiations with existing creditors and rating agencies. Influence often begins at the margin.

Risk of Gesture Without Plumbing

The danger in Rio is that political ambition once again outruns institutional capacity. Announcing an “alternative financial architecture” is easier than building the legal frameworks, risk models, compliance systems and mundane technology that would make it usable for banks and treasuries. To date, much of the heavy lifting for cross-border payment innovation has come from domestic initiatives — instant-payment systems, digital ID infrastructures, fintech rails — rather than from BRICS as a collective.

If the bloc cannot translate summit language into shared standards and interoperable platforms, its role will remain mostly symbolic: a place to vent frustration and signal defiance, while the core tasks of dollar funding and crisis management continue elsewhere. The longer that gap persists, the more sceptical markets will become about BRICS as anything more than a talking shop.

What Success Would Really Look Like

Success for BRICS in the financial sphere is unlikely to look like a dramatic replacement of one order with another. It would look, instead, like a gradual thickening of alternative channels. In ten or fifteen years, a slice of trade between members might routinely settle in their own currencies. The NDB and associated funds could become important, if not dominant, co-financiers of infrastructure and climate-transition projects. Reserve managers might hold a slightly more diversified basket of assets, including instruments linked to BRICS institutions.

Most importantly, the Global South’s voice in setting the rules — from capital adequacy and debt sustainability to climate-related financial disclosures — would be harder to ignore. That does not require a BRICS currency. It requires BRICS countries acting, when their interests align, as a negotiating bloc with their own data, proposals and backstop mechanisms rather than just reactions.

The Open Question in Rio

The Rio summit takes place at a moment when the gaps in the existing financial architecture are painfully obvious: slow debt restructurings, pro-cyclical credit ratings, climate risks priced late and unevenly. BRICS, expanded and emboldened, sees an opening. Whether it can seize it depends less on the leaders’ family photo and more on what technicians do in the years after the cameras leave: the payment codes they write, the swap lines they sign, the projects they quietly fund.

The world is not on the verge of a neat handover from one hegemon to another. It is drifting toward a messier landscape in which firms, banks and governments curate portfolios of relationships and systems. In that world, BRICS does not have to overthrow anything to matter. It simply has to work well enough, in enough places, that opting in becomes a rational choice rather than a political statement. Rio will show whether the bloc is ready to move from rhetoric about architecture to the unglamorous business of wiring the pipes.