Raynor de Best
Content expert covering payments and (crypto)currencies
Digital payments landscape in Mexico - statistics & facts
Digital payments in Mexico consist of credit cards in e-commerce, but are especially characterized by lack of digital transactions within physical stores. Mexico's share of cash ranks among the highest when compared to other countries in the Americas. A big reason for this is the country's largely unbanked population, with more than half of the country not having access to a bank account. Digital payment methods are used when shopping outside the country, though. More than half of Mexican online shoppers said they used PayPal over both debit and credit cards in cross-border e-commerce. This puts Mexico in an odd position. On the one hand, Mexicans seem willing to use digital payments in specific, cross-border, online scenarios. On the other hand, digital payments infrastructure needs development to facilitate use domestic use cases in physical shops.
Digital payments refer to any form of cashless payment, or payments conducted without banknotes or coins, in an online or offline environment. Such payments can include mobile payments - digital payments performed on a mobile device - but also relatively new trends like buy now, pay later (BNPL), cryptocurrency, or instant (real-time) payments. Out of all these digital options, which developments are noteworthy to know about for Mexico?
Digital payments refer to any form of cashless payment, or payments conducted without banknotes or coins, in an online or offline environment. Such payments can include mobile payments - digital payments performed on a mobile device - but also relatively new trends like buy now, pay later (BNPL), cryptocurrency, or instant (real-time) payments. Out of all these digital options, which developments are noteworthy to know about for Mexico?
DiMo, Mexico's second attempt at digital payments in four years
Mexico's central bank launched a new real-time (instant) payment scheme in March 2023 to help push financial inclusion in the country: Dinero Móvil or DiMo. It is the second centralized payment scheme using the country's gross settlement system SPEI after CoDi - an acronym for Cobro Digital - in 2019. CoDi emphasizes QR codes and contactless (tap to pay) technology, while DiMo focuses on payments with smartphones. The new system faces an uphill battle, as its predecessor's adoption was slow: The number of accounts that made at least one payment with CoDi was 1.2 million in 2022. Consequently, Mexico's instant payments were lower than elsewhere in the Americas, especially compared to real-time payments with Pix in Brazil. Figures on DiMo are not available yet in early 2024, but hopes are it would attract five million users in its first year. Success of this new system might impact forecasts of real-time payments in Mexico for the coming years.Mexico's BNPL market is relatively large
Perhaps aided by the lack of financial inclusion in Mexico, several companies sensed an opportunity to offer buy now, pay later services to the local populace. Mexico's two main players for BNPL are domestic: Kueski and Nelo. The former is an online consumer lender founded in 2012 and started to offer debt financing in late 2021 to help support BNPL products. Nelo was founded in 2019 and offers BNPL on Mexico's most popular e-commerce websites through a partnership with Mastercard. Estimates are that Mexico's BNPL market will take up a sizable part of buy now, pay later across all of Latin America come 2029.
