IN football, gegenpressing (Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool tactical masterclass) is often mistaken for the frantic chase after possession is lost. But its real intelligence lies in compact spacing, rehearsed triggers in transition play, and several players closing the same escape routes before the opponent reorganises. One player running alone is exertion. A formation moving in concert creates real pressure.
BRICS is arriving at precisely this distinction in economic statecraft.
The New Delhi Declaration, adopted at the 18th BRICS Summit, does not disguise the terrain. It registers concern over unilateral tariffs and non-tariff measures while condemning unilateral coercive measures contrary to international law, including economic and secondary sanctions. However, its significance is not just naming the pressures on the Global South—BRICS has done that before, consistently and with increasing clarity. The more consequential material lies deeper: payment interoperability, local-currency financing, multilateral guarantees, insurance and reinsurance capacity, a New Investment Platform (NIP), settlement infrastructure and the further development of the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA).
This is not a grouping lacking ideas or institutions. It is an emerging financial formation approaching its operational phase.
As EMIR Research argued last year in “Mapping the Rise of BRICS: Declarations, Designs and a Future Unfolding”, the movement is from declaration to design. Read against the 2025 Rio de Janeiro Declaration, New Delhi continues that shift, laying the foundations for genuine financial autonomy.
Rio proposed the BRICS Multilateral Guarantees (BMG) initiative, with guidelines to incubate it in the New Development Bank (NDB). New Delhi moves it toward pilot transactions.
Insurance and reinsurance talks have gained institutional shape through the proposed BRICS Insurance Resilience Centre (BIRC) and India’s BRICS Risk Lab at GIFT City’s IFSC. The NIP has moved from concept to finalised guidelines and a dedicated Study Group. Settlement and depositary dialogue has produced a technical workshop. The CRA is being refined through treaty amendments and onboarding talks, its ninth test run pending.
Even the frequently misunderstood payments agenda has advanced, albeit deliberately. The BRICS Payment Task Force (BPTF) is studying interoperability of payment and financial messaging channels while discussions continue on local currencies in trade and investment.
This is how institutional vocabulary matures: frameworks to rules, rules to pilots, pilots to ordinary transactions.
The NDB provides the clearest evidence that implementation within the wider BRICS architecture is already more than rhetorical. By its own assessment, local-currency financing was 45.9% of 2025 approvals and 34% cumulatively, beating its 30% strategy target. The financing has mainly involved the renminbi (RMB), South African rand and Indian rupee. In September 2026, the NDB issued another RMB 7 billion Panda bond, bringing cumulative issuance in China’s interbank bond market to RMB 94.5 billion.
However, the next BRICS challenge is less about institutional invention than institutional orchestration.
BRICS financial components mature unevenly. The NDB is operational and expanding. The CRA is an established safety net undergoing refinement and testing. The proposed guarantee mechanism nears pilot stage. Payment, insurance, investment and settlement initiatives remain at varying degrees of technical development. There is nothing unusual about such asymmetry. The risk arises only if these mechanisms continue advancing along parallel tracks without eventually meeting.
BRICS should use its next cycle to run at least one fully integrated, documented cross-border transaction linking these instruments—testing whether the emerging architecture can operate as a system rather than as a collection of promising components.
Consider, for example, an infrastructure or renewable-energy supply chain involving a producer, contractor and buyer operating across several BRICS economies. The NDB could provide an appropriate local-currency financing component. A pilot under the BMG initiative could mitigate part of the credit or political risk. The functions envisaged for the BIRC and Risk Lab could be tested against the transaction’s foreign-exchange, logistics and sovereign-risk profile. The NIP could examine avenues for mobilising institutional investors, while the BPTF could test interoperable messaging and payment arrangements between participating financial institutions.
This is important because one integrated transaction could teach BRICS more about its emerging architecture than another year of parallel technical discussions. Such a pilot would not begin BRICS implementation, already under way, but its operational integration.
Importantly, the New Delhi Declaration itself recognises “no one-size-fits-all” for cross-border payments. That logic recurs throughout: voluntary participation, interested members, national priorities, country-specific circumstances, a phased, member-driven approach. Far from signalling weakness, this may reveal one of the most promising institutional advantages of BRICS: the ability to build economic cooperation without demanding premature uniformity.
BRICS economies differ substantially in exchange-rate regimes, capital-account rules, banking structures, technology and commercial priorities. Imposing uniformity at the outset would turn ambition into immobilisation.
The practical model is interoperability without compulsory uniformity: common minimum standards, modular participation, bilateral or plurilateral corridors, and a clear route for other members and partners to join once a mechanism proves useful.
A modest BRICS implementation compact could provide: each presidency identifies a finite number of cross-institutional pilots, assigns responsible bodies, sets dates, and reports measurable outcomes at the following summit. This would require no new supranational authority and no abandonment of consensus. It would simply give the machinery already authorised by BRICS a shared operational rhythm.
Predictably, there will be critics for whom anything short of a common currency represents failure, just as there will be supporters tempted to treat every new declaration as delivery. Both positions misunderstand how financial orders change over the course of history. Instead of disappearing in a single dramatic rupture they often recede as alternative channels become sufficiently numerous, credible and interconnected that no single gatekeeper can close every exit.
Against President Donald Trump’s renewed tariff threats and Washington’s continued reliance on sanctions, EMIR Research repeats a consistent point: Washington’s coercive leverage rests on the inflated assumption that access to the United States (US) market is indispensable. With approximately 342 million people, the US is little more than 4% of humanity. The eleven BRICS members, the institutional core of BRICS+, account for 49.5% of the global population, 40% of global GDP and 26% of global trade. Their combined population base is roughly twelve times that of the US.
Headline US consumption figures also conceal how unevenly the income underpinning that consumption is distributed. In 2025, the highest-income quintile received 52.4% of aggregate household income before tax and 48.7% after taxes and credits, while only 63% of adults said they would cover a hypothetical US$400 emergency expense entirely with cash or its equivalent.
These figures do not make the US market irrelevant, nor does population alone create effective demand. They do, however, expose the absurdity of treating it as indispensable. Tariffs retain leverage where economies remain excessively dependent on American demand, but that leverage is far from absolute. The proper BRICS+ counterpress, therefore, is to convert its vastly greater demographic and productive scale into effective internal demand through deeper intra-BRICS trade, local-currency settlement, multilateral guarantees, trade insurance and NDB financing.
Malaysia too, as a BRICS partner, should read New Delhi as both opening and test. Partner status must gradually gain practical economic content. Malaysia should actively seek defined, opt-in routes for partner countries to join appropriate BRICS financial pilots.
Malaysia possesses relevant capabilities. Its experience in Islamic finance and sukuk could inform investment-platform and infrastructure-financing models. Its takaful and retakaful ecosystem could contribute expertise to the emerging insurance architecture. Its participation in regional payment connectivity initiatives, its trade-finance institutions and its position within the ASEAN manufacturing networks make it a natural testing ground for cross-border transactions.
One meaningful assignment would be worth more than a ceremonial seat: participation in a payment-interoperability pilot, contribution to risk-modelling work, an insurance collaboration or a trade corridor through which guarantee and settlement instruments can be tested together.
EMIR Research’s earlier mutual credit-clearing proposal (“BRICS’ Currency Dilemma: A Necessary Quality Leap Beyond the Dollar”) remains relevant for reducing scarce reserve currency needed to settle recurring trade. It need not compete with current instruments. On the contrary, the practical data and institutional trust generated by payment and settlement pilots could eventually provide the foundation for it.
In short, New Delhi does not reveal a BRICS trapped in declarations. It reveals an increasingly sophisticated financial architecture whose separate components are moving, albeit unevenly, towards operational maturity. However, the external pressures that vindicate this architecture also demand that BRICS accelerate the transition from parallel initiatives to coordinated resilience. The formation is taking shape. It must now learn to move as one.
Dr Rais Hussin is the President / CEO of EMIR Research, a think tank focused on strategic policy recommendations based on rigorous research.
** The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the position of Astro AWANI.
