In other words, Mexico can open more accounts, but that doesn’t mean people will use them or that they can move their money between services without friction.
According to the Interledger Foundation, Mexico has a solid infrastructure—real-time payments, ecosystem fintechgrowing mobile penetration—but the lack of open standards and real connections between platforms means that many users end up returning to cash.
This occurs when a digital payment is not integrated with other services, when a remittance cannot be easily converted into savings or credit, or when a small business needs multiple apps and credentials that do not “speak” to each other.
“Core infrastructure alone is not enough if three bottlenecks are not addressed, such as rural connectivity, costs and usability for small businesses, and interoperability between systems,” says Briana Marbury, CEO of Interledger.
The PNIF recognizes the importance of interoperability, but does not detail an operational plan to build it. Although it talks about open standards and promoting digital payments, it does not establish a specific implementation schedule, a national open rails architecture or a strategy to avoid the creation of new digital silos, that is, isolated financial services, each with its own rules, its own app and your own information.
In fact, the success of Pix in Brazil is largely explained because the central bank created a single and mandatory infrastructure for all banks and appspreventing everyone from operating on their own. This common network prevented the formation of “silos” and allowed any user to send and receive money instantly regardless of the platform, accelerating mass adoption and the decrease in the use of cash.
And this matters because, without this common layer, the financial system continues to fragment, according to specialists, since each actor develops its own solution, but the end user continues to have to jump from one ecosystem to another.
Unlike other countries in the region, Mexico continues to lag behind in digital payments and the majority of everyday transactions are still carried out in cash, a much higher proportion than in Brazil, where the Pix system is already the preferred method and digital transactions dominate day-to-day life. While Brazil has a decade of advantage in digitalization and connectivity of services, in Mexico tools such as CoDi or DiMo have not managed to displace cash or accelerate the adoption of electronic payments in a significant way.
Fintech Law and SPEI 2.0 are moving in that direction
Faced with this criticism, the Union of Mexican Financial Institutions (Unifimex) —one of the sectoral bodies that participate in the implementation of the PNIF— recognizes the challenge, but emphasizes that the country “does have solid foundations” and that the regulation of standardized APIs derived from the Fintech Law and the evolution towards SPEI 2.0, designed to strengthen open rails and common standards, constitute the foundations of that interoperability.
Although the PNIF does not include a technical schedule, Unifimex affirms that there are coordination mechanisms between CNBV, Banxico and the Treasury where standards are adjusted and technical opinions from banks and fintech. “Our goal is to contribute to interoperability that works for institutions of all sizes,” the organization said in response to Expansión.
The entity also recognizes that the risk of creating “digital islands” is real if financial services do not communicate with each other. For this reason, it states that the PNIF promotes central elements such as portability, data standardization and technological neutrality, while SPEI 2.0 will be the key piece to connect digital payments between different platforms.
The issue, they say, is part of the active agenda of the Unifimex Standards and Regulation Committee, which analyzes together with medium, large and fintech how to avoid fragmentation that ends up discouraging the use of digital channels.
Five apps, for five different things… it doesn’t work
Luis Hernández Rangel, CEO of Actinver, insists that digitalization will only generate real inclusion if the services that are dispersed today—payments, transfers, investments, savings, insurance—can be connected under common rules.
“If the user has to use five applications for five different needs, they are not going to use any; interoperability is not only technical, it is user experience and effective competition,” explained the executive during the Actinver Challenge awards, a competition trading where each participant simulates investing in stocks, with a virtual million pesos.
Hernández Rangel also pointed out that SPEI 2.0 and the regulation of APIs open a historic opportunity to democratize investment and savings products, as long as the infrastructure layer is designed as a digital public good and not as a set of closed solutions, as until now.
