The BRICS club of emerging economies wants to find a way of bypassing the dollar to create a fairer payment system that would not be skewed toward wealthier countries, South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor told Sputnik.
"We have always been concerned by the fact that there is a dominance of the dollar and that we do need to look at alternative… The systems currently in place tend to privilege very wealthy countries and tend to be really a challenge for countries, such as ourselves, which have to make payments in dollars which costs much more in terms of our various currencies. So I do think a fairer system has to be developed and it's something we're discussing with the BRICS ministers in the economic sector discussions," she said.
Pandor said that one of the reasons why BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — set up the jointly-run New Development Bank (NDB) in 2014 was to find an alternative to the dollar-based payments architecture.