Digital Payments & Fintech - Mexico

The Ley Fintech (2018) is the primary law; the CNBV is the licensing authority for Financial Technology Institutions (ITF), acting with the favorable opinion of Banxico and SHCP. Mexico was among the first countries with a bespoke fintech statute.

Electronic Payment Funds Institutions (Instituciones de Fondos de Pago Electrónico) are the e-money/payments license: they may issue, redeem and transfer electronic funds and run digital wallets, subject to CNBV authorization, capital requirements and AML/CFT obligations. They cannot pay interest on balances.

Banxico operates SPEI, a 24/7 real-time interbank transfer system (settlement in seconds). CoDi (QR/NFC, launched 2019) and DiMo (phone-number transfers, launched 2023) run on top of SPEI to drive low-cost account-to-account payments, though CoDi adoption remains modest.

Article 76 of the Fintech Law mandates broad open data sharing across all supervised financial entities (wider than EU PSD2). Only the 'open data' tier (e.g., ATM/branch data, rules published June 2020) is implemented; secondary API standards for transactional data remain unissued years past the statutory deadline, prompting an amparo lawsuit against CNBV/Banxico/SHCP in early 2026.

Buy-now-pay-later is growing rapidly but lacks a dedicated regime; providers operate without a specific BNPL license, and the regulatory posture has been 'observe and educate.' Tighter rules (credit-bureau reporting, fee transparency, limits) are anticipated but not yet in force.

The law also licenses crowdfunding (collective financing) institutions and provides a regulatory sandbox ('novel models'). Authorized ITFs are supervised by the CNBV; conduct/consumer issues fall to CONDUSEF.