BRICS Isn't Replacing the Dollar. It's Trying to Make It Less Necessary

BRICS is not about to replace the US dollar. Its more important ambition is to make the global economy less dependent on it. The 2026 BRICS summit showed that the bloc is moving toward alternative payment systems, local-currency trade and development finance, but it also exposed how difficult it will be to turn political ambition into economic infrastructure.

The 18th BRICS Summit ended in New Delhi on September 13 with a 140-point declaration covering trade, finance, artificial intelligence, energy, critical minerals and global governance. The group now consists of 10 full members: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Indonesia and the UAE.

That expansion gives BRICS considerable economic weight. But size alone does not create influence. The real question is whether these countries can build institutions that businesses actually use.

The dollar is not going anywhere

Talk of a "BRICS currency" has dominated coverage of the bloc for years. The reality is much less dramatic.

India's Ministry of External Affairs explicitly said there is no proposal for a common BRICS currency. Instead, members are discussing how more bilateral trade can be settled in their own currencies and how cross-border payments can become cheaper and faster.

The distinction matters.

Creating a shared currency would require countries with very different inflation rates, interest rates, fiscal positions and economic structures to surrender substantial monetary independence. BRICS is nowhere close to that level of integration.

Local-currency settlement is much easier.

If an Indian importer can pay a Chinese exporter in rupees and yuan through an efficient settlement mechanism, both companies have less need to convert through dollars. The dollar still exists, but one transaction that previously relied on it no longer does.

That is the realistic version of de-dollarisation: not eliminating the dollar, but reducing the number of transactions that require it.

But BRICS still lacks the plumbing

This is where the summit revealed a major limitation.

The New Delhi Declaration welcomed the work of the BRICS Payment Task Force on cross-border payment mechanisms and acknowledged studies into interoperability between payment and messaging systems. It also supported further discussions on using local currencies for trade and investment.

But these are still largely technical discussions and voluntary cooperation.

India had pushed for greater interoperability between BRICS payment systems, including possible links involving central-bank digital currencies. That proposal did not make it into the final declaration as a concrete mechanism.

This is important because payment systems benefit from network effects.

A payment network becomes more useful as more banks, businesses and consumers use it. BRICS therefore cannot simply announce an alternative to existing infrastructure. It needs banks to participate, businesses to trust it, regulators to coordinate and currencies to remain sufficiently liquid.

Until that happens, the dollar retains a major advantage: everyone already uses it.

Development finance may be the bigger opportunity

BRICS' most tangible economic institution is not a currency. It is the New Development Bank.

The bank has already financed nearly $43 billion of projects, giving BRICS an existing mechanism through which it can influence infrastructure and development finance.

The summit also backed progress on the BRICS Multilateral Guarantees initiative. The idea is to improve the creditworthiness of development projects and attract private capital, potentially lowering financing costs for infrastructure across BRICS and the wider Global South.

This could matter more than a headline-grabbing currency proposal.

For an emerging economy, the constraint is often not whether a road, power plant or railway is economically useful. It is whether the project can obtain financing at a reasonable cost.

If BRICS institutions can reduce that cost, they create something genuinely valuable.

The next battleground is technology

The summit also demonstrated that BRICS' economic ambitions extend beyond finance.

The declaration identifies artificial intelligence as a major opportunity for economic growth and development, while calling for cooperation around AI safety, accessibility, energy efficiency and governance.

Critical minerals received similar attention.

BRICS called for supply chains that are more reliable, diversified and resilient, while emphasising greater value addition and economic diversification in resource-rich countries. That matters because critical minerals underpin batteries, renewable-energy technologies and other parts of the global energy transition.

China is also pushing deeper economic and technological cooperation, including proposals around an AI Open Source Zone, special economic-zone partnerships and services trade.

This suggests that BRICS is gradually becoming more than a diplomatic grouping. Its members are trying to coordinate around the infrastructure of the next global economy: finance, technology, energy and raw materials.

But cooperation has a ceiling

The biggest obstacle is internal.

BRICS contains countries with radically different political systems, economic priorities and foreign-policy objectives. India and China are strategic competitors. Iran is under heavy Western sanctions, while the UAE maintains close relationships with the United States. Russia has a fundamentally different relationship with the West from Brazil or India.

The Middle East crisis provided a useful stress test.

Iran and the UAE are both BRICS members despite being on opposing sides of the current regional conflict. Yet the bloc still managed to adopt a joint declaration calling for maximum restraint and diplomacy.

That demonstrates something important: BRICS can coordinate without being politically unified.

Its future therefore probably does not depend on becoming an alliance with one foreign-policy position. It depends on whether members can cooperate selectively where their economic interests overlap.

The real BRICS test starts now

The New Delhi summit produced ambitious language, but relatively little new economic infrastructure.

That is not necessarily failure. Building payment networks, financial guarantees and trade mechanisms takes years.

But it does change what investors and policymakers should watch.

The important question is no longer whether BRICS will "destroy the dollar." It is whether local-currency trade becomes large enough to matter, whether BRICS payment systems become genuinely interoperable, and whether institutions such as the New Development Bank can provide capital at competitive costs.

If they do, the dollar could slowly lose some of its dominance without ever being formally challenged by a replacement currency.

The real test for BRICS is therefore not whether it can announce an alternative to the existing economic system, but whether businesses eventually find that alternative cheaper, faster and reliable enough to actually use.