Mexico is processing more digital payments than ever before, yet cash continues to dominate everyday life.
That apparent contradiction says more about financial inclusion in the country than any fintech funding round or card issuance metric.
Cash is still used in roughly 85% of small purchases in Mexico, and more than half of debit cards issued in the country remain inactive, according to Banxico data. This is the real challenge.
For millions of Mexicans, money is born in cash. Salaries, suppliers, rent, and savings all move through it. In that context, financial inclusion cannot be measured by cards issued or accounts opened. It has to be measured by how easily people move between the physical and digital economy.
For years, fintech has treated digitization as the finish line. In markets like Mexico, it is closer to the destination than the starting point. The real work happens at the bridge: cash-in, cash-out, bill payments, direct debit, and the infrastructure that makes transactions traceable without making them complicated.
Mexico has tried this before. CoDi, the instant payment rail launched by Banxico in 2019, never reached the scale it was designed for. The rail worked. What it could not solve was everything around it: the cash-in moment, the merchant who does not accept QR, the user who never opens the app. A rail is only as useful as the path that leads people to it.
This is also why many fintechs are evolving into banks.
Players like Nubank, Mercado Pago, and others are not just competing for wallet share anymore. They are building deeper financial relationships: deposits, savings, lending, payroll, collections, and increasingly, full banking infrastructure.
That shift matters because financial inclusion is not solved at the checkout screen. It is solved when someone can receive money, move it, automate it, save it, and build a financial history around it. Banking licenses help. Infrastructure matters more.
A digital bank without strong rails for deposits and withdrawals still leaves users outside the system. A wallet without bill pay or direct debit still creates friction. A card without acceptance or trust becomes another unused piece of plastic in a drawer.
Mexico does not need more financial products. It needs better financial connectivity.
Brazil’s Pix is the obvious counterexample. When infrastructure is built once, made interoperable, and pushed by the central bank as default, adoption follows. Mexico’s story is more fragmented: multiple rails, uneven merchant acceptance, regional cash dependence, and operational friction that no single player can solve alone.
Then there is trust. Mexico’s relationship with banks is still shaped by the crises of the 1980s and 1990s. Many consumers trust the person behind the counter more than the institution behind the app. That gap will not close with better UX. It closes when systems work the way people actually live, not the way a product roadmap imagines they should.
The future of payments in Mexico will not be decided by cash versus digital, but rather by those who build the connection between the two.
At tapi, we see this every day. Financial inclusion happens through very practical infrastructure: cash-in and cash-out ramps across more than 2,000 municipalities, bill payments and direct debit embedded inside banking and fintech apps, and traceable cash collections that ensure transactions do not disappear outside the system.
That is where inclusion becomes real. When moving money is easy enough, people do not need to be pushed into digitization. They get there on their own.
The opportunity here in Mexico is not to replace cash, to drive financial inclusion. Actually, it is quite the opposite. The true potential is to make cash part of a system that works.