BRICS and Iran: What Is Actually Usable for Trade?
Beyond the rhetoric of a new economic order, the practical question for Iranian businesses is simpler: what can BRICS actually change in a transaction today?
Since Iran formally joined BRICS, much of the discussion around the grouping has focused on geopolitical scale: its share of global population, the rise of non-Western economies, de-dollarisation, and the possibility of a financial architecture less dependent on the United States and Europe.
For companies trading with Iran, however, those questions are secondary.
An exporter in Tehran trying to receive payment from India, an industrial buyer importing machinery from China, or a petrochemical producer selling to a customer in another BRICS economy faces much more immediate problems: tariffs, banking access, currency conversion, counterparty risk, shipping, insurance and settlement.
Measured against those problems, BRICS looks considerably different.
It is neither a free-trade area nor a customs union. It does not have a common currency. There is no fully operational BRICS-wide payment network that an Iranian company can simply switch to instead of the existing international financial system. And despite Iran’s membership in BRICS, Iran is not currently a member of the New Development Bank.
Yet this does not make BRICS commercially irrelevant.
Its value for Iran lies elsewhere: in the concentration of important trading partners inside the same political-economic framework, the gradual expansion of local-currency settlement, bilateral payment connections, financial interoperability efforts, and trade corridors that can reduce some—but not all—of the friction surrounding Iranian commerce.
The distinction matters.
Iran already trades heavily inside the BRICS orbit
BRICS is not creating Iran’s commercial relationship with China, India, the UAE or Russia. Those relationships already existed.
What BRICS does is place several of Iran’s most important economic counterparties inside a recurring framework for financial, trade and infrastructure cooperation.
UN Trade and Development reported in 2026 that Iran sources more than 40 percent of its imports from other BRICS economies. Iranian customs figures cited in the BRICS Economic Bulletin also put Iran’s customs exports to BRICS economies at approximately USD 23.7 billion and imports from them at USD 38.8 billion during the first eleven months of the Iranian year corresponding broadly to March 2024 through February 2025.
This is the first reason to take BRICS seriously.
For Iran, BRICS trade is not primarily a hypothetical future market. Much of it already exists.
China is deeply embedded in Iran’s import and export structure. The UAE remains one of the country’s most important commercial and re-export nodes. India remains relevant across commodities, food, pharmaceuticals, industrial goods and transport connectivity. Russia has become increasingly important in agriculture, energy, transport and financial cooperation.
But membership alone does not make trading with any of them frictionless.
That is where the difference between BRICS as a political grouping and BRICS as commercial infrastructure becomes important.
What BRICS does not provide: preferential market access
Perhaps the easiest misconception to remove is that BRICS membership creates something resembling participation in a free-trade agreement.
It does not.
There is no common BRICS external tariff, no bloc-wide removal of customs duties, and no general preferential tariff regime automatically available to Iranian exporters because Iran is a member.
A shipment from Iran to India or Brazil continues to face the applicable national customs regime and whatever bilateral or multilateral agreements govern that product.
In practical terms, another agreement can therefore be much more valuable to an Iranian exporter than BRICS membership itself.
Iran’s full free-trade agreement with the Eurasian Economic Union, for example, entered into force in May 2025. For trade with Russia and other EAEU members, its tariff provisions can have a much more direct effect on transaction economics than the fact that Iran and Russia are both members of BRICS.
This illustrates a broader rule:
BRICS can create the political environment for deeper trade, but businesses still need to identify the actual legal instrument that changes the economics of each transaction.
Sometimes that instrument will be a bilateral agreement. Sometimes it will be an FTA. Sometimes it will be a customs arrangement, transport corridor or banking agreement.
BRICS itself is usually the layer above them.
Local currencies are real. A BRICS payment system is not—at least not yet
Payments are probably the area where expectations surrounding BRICS are highest.
There is genuine movement here.
BRICS governments have repeatedly supported greater use of national currencies in trade. The bloc has created a Cross-Border Payments Initiative, and finance ministries and central banks are studying greater interoperability between payment systems.
In 2026, discussions have advanced further toward connecting national instant-payment systems and potentially central-bank digital currencies.
But the wording matters.
These systems are still being discussed, tested and connected. There is not yet a universal commercial rail through which an Iranian company can send or receive money across every BRICS country with the simplicity of a domestic bank transfer.
There is also no common BRICS currency.
For Iranian businesses today, the more relevant development is therefore not a future “BRICS currency,” but the growing possibility of bilateral settlement outside the dollar.
Iran and Russia provide one example. The two countries have been working on integration between Iran’s Shetab network and Russia’s Mir infrastructure, alongside broader rial-ruble settlement arrangements.
Similar logic can apply elsewhere through correspondent banking, local-currency accounts, currency swaps or intermediary financial institutions.
These arrangements can reduce exposure to the dollar and to some Western payment infrastructure.
They do not eliminate compliance risk.
Sanctions remain outside BRICS control
This is the most important limitation.
BRICS membership does not repeal U.S., European or UN-related restrictions affecting Iran, nor does it oblige a Chinese, Indian, Emirati or Brazilian bank to process an Iranian transaction.
Banks make their own risk decisions.
A financial institution with significant access to dollar clearing, Western investors or international markets may still avoid Iranian exposure even where the underlying trade is legitimate.
Iran also remains classified by the Financial Action Task Force as a high-risk jurisdiction subject to a call for action. As of June 2026, FATF continued to call for enhanced due diligence and countermeasures relating to Iran.
That creates a problem that political declarations alone cannot solve.
A BRICS country may support greater trade with Iran at the state level while a commercial bank in the same country rejects an Iranian counterparty at the compliance desk.
This explains why trade often continues through a narrower group of institutions, specialist intermediaries, exchange mechanisms and bilateral structures rather than through the entire banking system.
The practical lesson for companies is straightforward:
Being able to sell a product and being able to settle the transaction are two separate questions.
Both need to be solved before a BRICS market should be considered genuinely accessible.
The New Development Bank is less relevant to Iran than many assume
The New Development Bank is arguably BRICS’ most substantial institutional achievement.
It is a real multilateral development bank with a growing project portfolio, international credit ratings and financing activity across infrastructure and sustainable development.
But BRICS membership and NDB membership are not the same thing.
As of September 2026, Iran is not listed among the New Development Bank’s members.
The bank currently includes the five founding BRICS economies together with newer members such as Bangladesh, the UAE, Egypt, Algeria and Uzbekistan.
This means Iranian companies should not interpret BRICS membership as automatic access to NDB financing.
That could change if Iran eventually joins the institution. Until then, the bank is strategically relevant to Iran but not yet a general financing channel for Iranian projects.
Logistics may matter more than monetary symbolism
For physical trade, transport infrastructure can ultimately be more valuable than discussions over reserve currencies.
Iran sits between several BRICS economies and some of their most important trade routes.
The International North-South Transport Corridor can connect India and the Persian Gulf through Iran toward Russia and northern Eurasia. Iranian ports on the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman can support flows toward India, the UAE and other markets. Rail and road links toward Central Asia add another layer of connectivity.
Again, these are not exclusively BRICS projects.
But BRICS can reinforce the political incentives to invest in them.
For an Iranian exporter, a functioning corridor that reduces transit time by several days can be worth substantially more than a declaration advocating de-dollarisation.
This is where the commercial analysis of BRICS should focus: not on whether the bloc will replace the Western economic system, but on whether specific infrastructure reduces the cost or risk of moving goods, money or information.
The BRICS opportunity is highly uneven by country
Another mistake is to treat BRICS as a single market.
It is not.
For an Iranian company, China, the UAE, India, Russia, Brazil, South Africa or Indonesia present radically different commercial environments.
The appropriate strategy therefore starts with the country, not with the bloc.
China may offer scale, manufacturing supply chains and commodity demand.
The UAE can provide logistics, distribution, re-export infrastructure and access to a large regional commercial ecosystem, although financial and political conditions can materially change those channels.
Russia offers growing scope for local-currency settlement, Eurasian tariff preferences and north-south connectivity.
India offers a very large consumer and industrial market and strategic transport relevance, while banking and sanctions exposure can still complicate execution.
Other BRICS economies may offer selective opportunities in agriculture, chemicals, mining, pharmaceuticals or industrial products without yet representing major channels for Iranian trade.
Grouping all of them under a single “BRICS strategy” would therefore obscure more than it explains.
What is actually usable today?
For Iranian businesses, BRICS-related mechanisms can be separated into three categories.
Already usable
Bilateral trade relationships with major BRICS economies are substantial and established. Local-currency settlement is possible in selected corridors. Iran-Russia financial integration is progressing. Existing ports, logistics networks and trade corridors can support physical trade. Business councils, government trade missions and institutional contacts can also improve counterparty discovery and market access.
Useful but conditional
Local-currency payments can reduce dependence on the dollar, but require compatible banks, liquidity and counterparties. Preferential trade is valuable where separate agreements exist, but BRICS membership does not create it. Transport corridors can improve trade economics, but only when infrastructure, customs procedures and shipping conditions work in practice.
Not yet something Iranian companies should build a strategy around
A common BRICS currency does not exist. A seamless BRICS-wide payment network does not yet exist. BRICS membership does not neutralise sanctions or FATF-related compliance problems. Iran does not currently have direct membership access to New Development Bank financing.
That hierarchy is more useful than either extreme narrative surrounding the bloc.
BRICS is neither an empty diplomatic club nor a ready-made replacement for the Western financial and trading system.
The practical BRICS strategy for an Iranian company
An Iranian business considering a BRICS market should therefore ask five questions before treating membership as commercially meaningful:
- Is there actual demand for the product in the target BRICS economy?
- Does a bilateral or regional trade agreement change tariffs or market access?
- Which banks and currencies can actually settle the transaction?
- Can the goods be moved through a reliable and economical logistics corridor?
- What sanctions, compliance and counterparty risks remain after the transaction is structured?
If those five questions produce workable answers, BRICS may strengthen the transaction.
If they do not, membership in the same political bloc will not rescue it.
BRICS is best understood as optionality
The most realistic value of BRICS for Iran is therefore not the creation of an alternative world economy overnight.
It is optionality.
More currencies in which trade may eventually be settled. More financial systems that may become interoperable. More political support for non-dollar transactions. More investment in south-south trade corridors. More institutional contact between countries that already represent a large share of Iran’s trade.
For a country facing unusually severe restrictions on banking and external commerce, additional options have genuine economic value.
But they should not be confused with solutions that already exist.
For Iranian businesses, the opportunity lies in identifying where BRICS cooperation has crossed the line from declaration to infrastructure—and building transactions around those specific points.
That is a much narrower claim than saying BRICS will replace the West.
It is also a much more useful one.
