Payroll portability, that is, the possibility for a worker to decide in which bank they receive their salary and not necessarily in the one the company chooses, continues to rise in the country, and in just under a decade, it totals more than 8.7 millions of changes.
The most recent “Annual Report on Compliance with the Law for the Transparency and Regulation of Financial Services”, published a few days ago by the Bank of Mexico (Banxico), specified that between October 2023 and September 2024, 1 million 693,259 payroll portability events, this is 4.3% of payroll accounts.
Thus, 8 million 722,256 changes have been accumulated since November 2015.
The document specified that the third quarter of 2024 (last data recorded in the report) was the period in which there were the most payroll portability events, with around 470,000 changes.
Banxico highlighted that in a report on the matter, it was identified that 99.4% of the deposit accounts of employees were with the same institution that the employing company had contracted for the payroll dispersion service.
“This meant that, in the vast majority of cases, it was the employing company that chose the bank where the employee received their salary,” he noted.
He added: “This situation inhibits competition between banking institutions to attract clientele for payroll accounts.”
In this sense, he mentioned that the regulation establishes that the resources deposited by the employing company in the payroll accounts of its staff can be transferred to a deposit account of another banking institution chosen by the worker himself, without the institution that transfers being able to charge any penalty or charge to the person requesting payroll portability.
The central bank recalled that in 2010 it implemented the operating mechanism so that personnel could complete the portability procedure from the banking institution contracted by their employing company.
He pointed out that under this modality the incentives were not aligned between the worker and the institution, so since November 2015, the employee can also do the procedure from the bank where he wants to have his account.
New players in the financial system, mainly coming from the digital field, see a greater business opportunity in payroll portability, given that having the resources from workers’ accounts would allow them greater funding.
This is why some of these (such as Nu México and Mercado Pago) have sought to migrate to banking, given that currently only banks can pay payroll.
