When BRICS leaders convened in Kazan in October 2024 under the Russian chairmanship, the agenda was unambiguous: institutionalize the January 2024 enlargement, formalize a 'partner country' category, and accelerate work on cross-border payment rails that reduce dollar dependency. By the time the bloc met again under Brazil's 2025 presidency, ten full members and thirteen partner states were inside the tent, representing roughly 45 percent of the global population and, in purchasing-power-parity terms, more than 35 percent of world output.
The accession of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt is the single most consequential development. Riyadh's posture remains deliberately ambiguous — Saudi officials have repeatedly described participation as 'engagement' rather than membership while attending leaders' summits — but the economic gravitational pull is undeniable. The Kingdom's sovereign wealth complex, anchored by the Public Investment Fund, now operates joint platforms with the New Development Bank for infrastructure co-financing in Africa and Central Asia, and Aramco has expanded long-term crude contracts denominated partially in renminbi with Chinese refiners.
The UAE's accession is even more operationally significant. Abu Dhabi sits at the intersection of two strategic logics: it remains a security partner of the United States while functioning as the primary financial conduit for Russian capital, Iranian trade, and Chinese commodity flows after Western sanctions architecture tightened in 2022 and 2023. mBridge, the cross-border central bank digital currency platform piloted by the BIS Innovation Hub before its 2024 withdrawal, has continued under the stewardship of the UAE, China, Hong Kong, Thailand and Saudi Arabia, and now settles a small but growing share of intra-bloc trade.
Egypt's inclusion completes a Red Sea triangle that gives BRICS effective influence over both the Suez approaches and the Bab el-Mandeb. Cairo, structurally short on hard currency, has used membership to secure renminbi swap lines with the People's Bank of China and to negotiate restructuring with the New Development Bank on terms more favorable than what was previously available through Paris Club mechanisms. The political economy is straightforward: Egypt needed alternative liquidity, and BRICS provided a non-conditional alternative to IMF discipline.
Iran's membership is a parallel story driven by sanctions resilience rather than financial opportunity. Tehran has used the bloc to consolidate energy sales to China and India, to deepen barter mechanisms with Russia for agricultural goods and military components, and to argue for an institutionalized BRICS Cross-Border Payments Initiative that could, over a five-to-seven-year horizon, allow sanctioned actors to operate outside SWIFT-adjacent rails. Ethiopia, the only sub-Saharan African addition in the initial enlargement, gives the bloc a foothold in the Horn of Africa adjacent to the Gulf entrants.
What does this mean strategically? First, BRICS is no longer a coherent ideological bloc — it never was — but a coordination mechanism for middle and large powers seeking optionality. The phrase 'de-dollarization' that dominated 2023 commentary now reads as misleading. The dollar's share of global reserves remains above 57 percent and the eurodollar funding market is intact. What is occurring is the construction of a parallel payments and trade-finance layer designed for use in specific corridors — Russia–India, Iran–China, intra-Gulf, Africa–China — without dislodging the dollar's role in deep capital markets.
Second, the New Development Bank has matured into a credible counterparty. Under President Dilma Rousseff, the NDB approved more than $35 billion in cumulative lending by year-end 2025, with a growing share denominated in local currencies. Its operational model, which avoids the governance conditionalities attached to World Bank and IMF lending, is attractive to mid-sized emerging economies — particularly those with weakening democratic institutions that find Western conditionalities politically costly.
Third, the United States and the European Union are struggling to articulate a coherent response. The US Treasury has rightly identified the secondary sanctions risk created by mBridge and BRICS Pay, but unilateral enforcement against Gulf partners is constrained by the same security relationships that make those partners strategically valuable. The European Union, focused on Ukraine reconstruction, energy transition and the implementation of CBAM, has limited bandwidth for a parallel diplomatic offensive in the Global South.
Fourth, the bloc's internal heterogeneity is itself a strategic feature. The presence of Saudi Arabia and the UAE alongside Iran inside the same institution constrains the most maximalist Russian and Iranian proposals — particularly around payment systems explicitly designed for sanctions evasion. Gulf members will not endorse architecture that jeopardizes their access to dollar capital markets. The result is incremental, technical, and easy to underestimate.
For corporate decision-makers, three implications follow. First, treasury teams operating in BRICS+ jurisdictions should expect a measurable increase in local-currency invoicing requirements for commodity and infrastructure contracts over the next 24 months, particularly in Sino–Gulf and Sino–African corridors. Second, regulatory risk in third countries connected to bloc payment infrastructure — Turkey, Kazakhstan, Indonesia — will rise as OFAC sharpens its secondary sanctions focus. Third, M&A activity involving Chinese and Gulf state-linked acquirers in dual-use technology, ports and critical minerals will face increasingly aggressive CFIUS, FIRB and EU FDI screening.
For policymakers, the analytical error to avoid is treating BRICS as the Warsaw Pact of the 21st century. It is closer to a non-aligned movement with a balance sheet — a forum that allows members to pursue divergent national strategies while sharing institutional plumbing. The correct Western response is neither to dismiss the bloc nor to confront it frontally, but to compete on the terrain it has identified: development finance, payments infrastructure, and predictable rule-of-law-anchored capital.
Veritas Global Advisory will continue to track BRICS+ developments through our Global Affairs and Business & Investment desks. The 2026 South African presidency, scheduled to focus on industrial policy and the African Continental Free Trade Area, will be the first real test of whether the bloc can move from coordination to execution. Our next briefing will assess the implications of the BRICS Grain Exchange and the proposed BRICS Reinsurance Facility for global commodity and risk-transfer markets.
This research briefing is published by Veritas Global Advisory's editorial desks. Views expressed are those of the authors and do not constitute investment advice.