About

Jeff Alvares is a central bank lawyer working on the law and governance of payment infrastructure, central bank digital currencies and cross-border payments. He is Senior Counsel at the Banco Central do Brasil.

Central bank law, from the inside

Jeff joined the legal department of the Banco Central do Brasil in 2006, after graduating in law from the University of São Paulo, where his thesis on the concept of a security won a merit-based grant, was approved cum laude with the highest mark, and was published in the Revista de Direito Mercantil. His first years at the central bank covered the full range of central bank law: monetary policy and foreign exchange operations, bank supervision and resolution, deposit insurance, currency swap and reserve-pooling agreements, and the supervisory colleges and crisis management groups through which the central bank worked with foreign authorities responsible for internationally active banks.

He then completed an LL.M. at Harvard Law School (2011), concentrating in international finance under Professor Hal Scott and writing, under Professor Howell Jackson's supervision, a long paper on the optimal institutional design of financial regulation, approved with honors. He was an editor of the Harvard Business Law Review and a Summer Academic Fellow under Visiting Professor Morgan Ricks. Back in Brasília he became Deputy Chief Counsel and then Chief Counsel, International, responsible for the legal implementation of international standards on resolution, deposit insurance and payments.

The comparative years

From 2014 to 2018 Jeff served as counsel at the International Monetary Fund in Washington. He led technical assistance in more than 25 countries, helping authorities draft central bank, banking, bank resolution, deposit insurance and payments legislation on five continents. He reviewed central bank laws in safeguards assessments and took part in financial sector assessment programs. He also designed and taught courses on central bank law, payment systems and bank resolution at the IMF's regional training centers in Vienna, Mauritius and Kuwait, for officials from more than 100 countries. The work showed him how differently the same problems can be solved, and how much the legal design of an institution shapes what it can do.

Resolution, Pix and the cross-border agenda

He returned to the Banco Central in 2018 as advisor on bank resolution, participating in reforms of the resolution law and of resolution planning, and engaging with the Financial Stability Board and the International Association of Deposit Insurers. From 2019 he helped build the legal framework for Pix, Brazil's instant payment system, alongside work on open finance, the regulatory sandbox and the emergency liquidity facilities created during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In 2022–23 he joined the Secretariat of the Financial Stability Board in Basel. There he coordinated work on digital identity and data frameworks under the G20 Roadmap for Enhancing Cross-border Payments, contributed to the recommendations on global stablecoin arrangements, and took part in working groups of the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures on stablecoins, central bank digital currencies and the interlinking of fast payment systems.

Since 2023 he has been Senior Counsel at the Banco Central do Brasil, conducting legal work on Drex, Brazil's central bank digital currency pilot, and on Pix; contributing to Brazil's regulatory framework for stablecoins; and advising on the feasibility of linking Pix with the Eurosystem's TIPS service. Since 2018 he has also advised national authorities as a short-term expert for the IMF and a consultant to the World Bank.

The research question

Twenty years on both sides of payment system design, writing the rules at home and advising other countries on theirs, led to the question his research now pursues: When a central bank builds and operates a digital payment system, which of its functions require exclusive public provision, and which could be left open to competition? And what do domestic public law and international trade law say about the difference? His work develops a functional framework for answering those questions, from domestic systems to cross-border arrangements. See Research.

Jeff writes regularly on payments, central banking and financial regulation: in English for ProMarket, the Oxford Business Law Blog and Modern Diplomacy, and in Portuguese for Valor Econômico, Estadão, Jota and Conjur. See Publications.

Other

Jeff is licensed to practice law in Brazil. He has served on the editorial board of Revista da Procuradoria-Geral do Banco Central and as a peer reviewer for Economic Analysis of Law Review and Revista Direito GV. He works in Portuguese, English and Spanish, and has intermediate French, German and Italian.